Google Gemini Strikes Back, China Hits NVIDIA on Antitrust | Bill Bishop, Pete Shadbolt, Sadi Khan, Lukas Czinger, Kyle Samani

(00:42) - Google Gemini Strikes Back (01:59) - TBPN in the WSJ (04:31) - Google Gemini's Comeback Breakdown (36:15) - China Hits NVIDIA on Antitrust (41:42) - Bill Bishop, an entrepreneur and former media executive, is the author of the Sinocism China Newsletter, which provides expert insights into Chinese politics and economics. In the conversation, he discusses China's antitrust investigation into Nvidia, highlighting the potential for significant fines and the strategic timing of the probe amid U. S.-China trade negotiations. He also examines the complexities surrounding TikTok's operations in the U. S., emphasizing the legal challenges and geopolitical considerations influencing the platform's future. (01:01:16) - Timeline Reactions (02:30:22) - Pete Shadbolt, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of PsiQuantum, a quantum computing company based in the Bay Area, discusses the company's journey from academic research to securing a $1 billion funding round aimed at building large-scale quantum computers. He highlights their focus on developing a million-qubit system by leveraging semiconductor manufacturing, partnerships with entities like GlobalFoundries, and collaborations with governments in Australia and the U. S. to establish quantum computing facilities. Shadbolt emphasizes the strategic importance of quantum computing, its potential applications in fields like chemistry and materials science, and the necessity of substantial investment and innovation to overcome technical challenges and achieve practical, error-corrected quantum systems. (02:44:43) - Sadi Khan, co-founder and CEO of Aven, discusses the company's innovative home equity-backed credit card, which offers homeowners the ability to secure lower interest rates and earn 2% unlimited cash back on all transactions. By streamlining the traditionally lengthy HELOC process to just 15 minutes through advanced automation, including remote wet signatures executed by robotic arms, Aven provides a seamless and efficient borrowing experience. Khan also highlights the company's recent Series E funding and emphasizes Aven's commitment to offering the lowest cost of capital to consumers, regardless of fluctuating interest rate environments. (02:51:41) - Lukas Czinger, Vice President of Operations, Automation, and Manufacturing at Divergent 3D, discusses the company's recent $290 million Series E funding round, which will enable the expansion of their Los Angeles campus and the establishment of new facilities across the U. S. He emphasizes the strategic importance of locating these facilities near key defense and automotive clients to enhance collaboration and logistics. Additionally, Czinger highlights the versatility of Divergent's digital manufacturing platform, capable of seamlessly producing diverse products without downtime, and shares updates on the Czinger 21C hypercar, noting multiple deliveries in the U. S. and Europe, with plans for future variants and models. (03:00:54) - Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, a leading cryptocurrency investment firm, discusses raising $1.65 billion in two weeks for Ford Industries, aiming to establish it as a top digital asset treasury company with aspirations of becoming a $50 billion publicly traded entity. He highlights the strategic team collaboration with Jump and Galaxy, emphasizes opportunities in mergers and acquisitions, and outlines plans to leverage capital market structures to enhance shareholder value. (03:11:47) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Monday, September 15, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Oh, we got some, uh, we got some trust in the background.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Got some trust. We're trust up.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Trust up. Uh, we have, uh, made another improvement to the TVPN UltraDome. Uh, gonna work on having more guests in person, uh, more fun activities. We got a bunch more props. It's gonna be a great, great week, great month, great year, great decade, great lifetime.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  To be back.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  It is fantastic to be back.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard to be away from the UltraDome.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  It is, but.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Good time.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Uh, we have some, uh, some breaking news, of course. Gemini is at the top of the App Store charts.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  We have some of our own breaking news.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I don't know if we're allowed to break this news yet. Are we, uh, Dylan, are we good to break the news?

• 0:52John Coogan?

  We are good to break the news.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  We're good to break the news.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Let's tell everyone.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, we are going to be having our first Mag7 CEO.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Magnificent.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  TVPN this week, and he is none other than Mark Zuckerberg. You can see a totally real picture of him here. Um, so we're gonna be taking the show on the road Wednesday. We're gonna be up in, uh, in the Bay.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, live from Meta Connect. Very excited. There's gonna be a bunch of other guests tuning in. Uh, I will wait to share the exact names, uh, but they'll be going out on our X and our Substack over the next couple of days. So, very, very excited for this one. They have some crazy announcements and, uh, we'll be there on the ground.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Reporting live.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  It's all part of the long con to get Meta on Ramp. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to Ramp.com to get started. Uh, so in other Mag7 news, Gemini is surging.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about the Mag podcasting?

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk, we gotta talk about the other.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  This is the deck in another.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  No, you're good. Do whatever, whatever order you want.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  This is more important.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Okay. This is amazing. They didn't put us in quotes.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  They didn't put us in quotes.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  They didn't put us in quotes.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  We made it.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  We made it. We finally arrived.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a lot of people have been putting TBPN in quotes. They're claiming that, uh, like, you know.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, TBPN, whatever that means. Is that really the name of the show or is it something else?

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  The journalist claimed historically that it was because we were a show.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it really, we were reading between.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  I learned, I learned that when you're writing in, in English class back in high school, I learned that if it's a book title, you put it in italics. I, I thought quotes were only reserved for, you know, if you're not sure and it's a quote from somebody else saying something and you don't want to put it in your own words. You don't trust the source necessarily. Uh, I always viewed quotes as something of a, a point of skepticism. So it is fantastic to see that we have escaped the, the, the jail of quotes in, in the media.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  So very excited for this one.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  So appropriate that it happened in the Wall Street Journal, one of our favorite publications. We have.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Our favorite ever. This is, we will, a lot of people like to make comments about the legacy media. We will defend the Wall Street Journal with our lives.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Brandon Jacoby says, keep reading, fellas. It's quote TBPN in paragraph one. I'm looking at the screenshots. I see, no, no, no. Paragraph one, two, three. I'm, I, I, I don't know. I, I see, I don't see any quotes at all.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Copy of the journal.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's going on? Uh.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Kobe?

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Brandon Jacoby, we're putting you in the truth zone. I don't know. Maybe, maybe they added, they added quotes later or something. I don't know. But the, the copy that I have does not have it in quotes. So I'm, I'm happy and I'm sticking with it. I've screenshotted it and I'm, uh, taking a victory.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, for those that don't know, uh, I hired Dylan at Party Round back in 2021.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was my right-hand man through, uh, the chaos of the Zerp era, the joy. We did a bunch of, uh, uh, work together that was, that, uh, prior to TBPN was really the highlight of my career. So very excited to have him on the team, behind the scenes, helping us, uh, make the show better and better every day. So.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very excited.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Bigger and bigger things.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  You have some, some news you'd like to talk about.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, the tech news. Um, anyway, uh, the main news is Restream, uh, one livestream thirty plus destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience wherever they are. Only possible, the show is made possible because of Restream. We are, of course, built on the back of Restream. But the real news is, uh, Ajnani Midha over at Andreessen Horowitz says the empire strikes back and shows a screenshot of worldwide Google Trends results for the past ninety days for Gemini versus ChatGPT. And you can see that Nano Banana launched late August and Gemini has been surging in the worldwide results. And so I dug into this. I have a bunch of thoughts on, on what's going on

• 4:58John Coogan?

  with Google, DeepMind and Gemini in particular. Um, and then Ajnani actually followed up a week later on September fourteenth and said, the empire goes bananas, uh, and shows that, uh, now Gemini has crossed ChatGPT in terms of worldwide search results, which is even, you know, I, I, I think it's an important metric to be tracking. Uh, Gemini is also at the top of the App Store charts right now. Um, but, uh,

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  It's such a, it's such a funny dynamic. It's like, like, you know, Google

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  runs a large, you know, the largest search engine in the world, and then they're trying to get their

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  alternative to search higher in the, on the search rankings

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Rankings.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  than their competitor

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  running the technology that they created.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, it is, uh, it is a knockout drag out fight in the, uh, the battle for the next AI platform. Um, so I went and tried to get the even more up to date data from Google Trends and it's true. Uh, Gemini is absolutely surging, uh, worldwide. Um, and, and as of today, Gemini is, is significantly higher than ChatGPT. Now, I think some of this is momentum driven. Um, I also needed to check, is this related to astrology? Because Gemini, of course, is Gemini, it could be Gemini season. Uh, but Gemini season is in May and June, so it doesn't have anything to do with Gemini season, as far as I can tell.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  I should ask Gemini. What what the best like if I were running Gemini?

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  The AI application.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  What would be the best time of the year astrologically to to like, you know, send it on marketing?

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Send it on marketing?

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like what?

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  What am I most likely to?

• 6:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Experience success?

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Well, so I I I wanted to understand a little bit more about the the the the search interest and what's actually going on here. So I went to Google Trends and I started to segment by different regions and different time periods. And if you go to the third slide, you'll see that in the United States Gemini is seeing an uptick, but ChatGPT is still dominant. And so you can see, so that is the worldwide data there, Jordy, you'll see. And then the next slide is, this is for the United States. And so for the United States, ChatGPT is still dominant. You see this like up and down of of peaks and troughs. I think those are weekends and I think that you see a lot more ChatGPT usage during the week.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  And then people kind of chill on the weekends, which is interesting dynamic. There's also schools.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a school factor.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Back to work.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  Work factor.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yes, and so.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  I I I do, I wonder what that data, I mean, you can't. You can't necessarily get that data for Google Search because itself, because people aren't Googling Google.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  They're not Googling Google Search.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  But you have to imagine like I probably use Google more on the weekdays.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Probably, yeah, I think most people do.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Uh, and so I wanted to know what was driving the worldwide surge in Gemini traffic. Uh, scrolled around to a couple different, um, couple different areas. India is absolutely spiking. So if you go to the next slide, um, you will see right there, look at that chart, Jordy. So Gemini is just kind of a flat line relative to ChatGPT and then just completely surged uh, just in the last few days. And so I think that that's what's driving the overall, the overall trend in Gemini dominance. Um, because if you go to I, on the next slide, I go to the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom is similar, similar to the US, seeing a little bit of an uptick in Gemini searches. But it's not completely overtaken ChatGPT.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  So there's a, there's a few different narratives here. One could just be Google has stronger penetration in certain international countries and they're pushing different things there with marketing or deals. There's a whole bunch of different dynamics that can drive, even just AEB tests on how quickly a, like, how quickly are they routing you to that particular app? Like, you forget that, like, when you have a billion users, billions of users, just setting the default user experience flow can route a ton of traffic to one thing all of a sudden.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  So I got prompted, I did a Google search this morning and I got prompted to use the AI.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Search overviews.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Search. No, no, no.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  No.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  I got prompted.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  AI mode. AI mode does not count as Gemini. That's not what we're talking about here, which is interesting. But yes, I mean, it's all, and I'm sure you go through the flow.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. I just assumed they were counting that as a gate under the hood.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  So AI mode is a, is, is within the Google search product. Gemini is its own product. And, and to be clear, Gemini is doing really well. So qualitatively, VO3, incredible. I've made a bunch of fun videos, everything from monster truck videos for my son to promo ads for what, you know, we do here at TBPN. VO3, I was not a daily Gemini user. I had not paid Google any money for Gemini's pro plan. I was paying for the ChatGPT. VO3 got me to fork over $250 a month, which I think is probably around $500 a month now because I didn't cancel. And, and I'm very happy with that. Like, it's been a good value trade and I feel like I'm

• 10:11John Coogan?

  getting access to a frontier model that I can't get anywhere else. And so it's worth every penny. Nano Banana has also produced incredible results and a lot of people are, are citing the, the massive growth as driven by Nano Banana. Now, I haven't been, I haven't been going bananas. Have you been going bananas lately? I've tried it a little bit. I had, I just, I don't really have something in my workflow. It feels like Nano Banana might almost be more useful if you're doing like professional level work. I've been sort of like interested in using it, but it hasn't become part of my daily workflow.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  I think when we're traveling, you have a little less time to make memes and

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that's it.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  You probably would have.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  I did find that it was fantastic at that specific thing. You can, and I saw Dylan Patel post this, you can take, you can take a meme template and two images and just say Nano Banana, like fill it in and it will just do it. It'll just basically do the Photoshop of like, or like, you know, the layout to put the images over each other and it just does it flawlessly. And so normally I would be going to

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  That seems to be enough to take Google from three to four trillion.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  I, I would agree. Normally I go to something called like Image Flip and then I have to like type in the text and then put in the images and it, it's this web UI that's like decent. It works pretty well, but being able to just do that all in a chat box seems really cool.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, quantitatively, Gemini is crushing. It has 483,000 ratings. A little hot on the levels there. I love that. Uh, oh, Bobby in the chat says it's Google's birthday. So happy birthday, Google. We are celebrating you today. It's like, yeah, it was a little hot. Um, so the, uh, in the iOS App Store, Gemini is now number one on the productivity charts.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Google celebrates its birthday on September 27th, but September 15th, 15th was when the google.com domain name was registered.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  Domains are more important than, than anything else. So I agree. Today is, today's Google's birthday in my book.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  So, uh, to, to put, to, to comp Gemini and ChatGPT, Gemini, about half a million ratings. ChatGPT has almost four million ratings. So ChatGPT is still the dominant app in the US iOS App Store, but Gemini is certainly growing. Um, and there's an open question, you know, I, I, I'm still noodling on like, how much is the Gemini growth driven by Nano Banana versus back to school, back to work versus like international efforts and stuff? Tyler, do you have a, do you have a thesis?

• 12:57John Coogan?

  I don't, we, we don't have your mic right now. Let's turn up, uh, can we turn up Tyler's levels? Hello, hello, hello. Just yell.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Okay, uh, okay. Yeah, now you're going to me. So, so I'm looking at, um, chat GPT, um, when, uh, four O image came out and it was March 25th. Um, if you look at the trends, there's like literally no spike in Google's search traffic.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  For images in chat GPT?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  For, if you just look up chat GPT.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  There's no, like, you can't tell when image came out. It was like very surprising.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Uh, and, and you're specifically referring to like the Studio Ghibli moment that was super viral on X. Got it. Interesting. Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  So I, like, it makes me think that, like, maybe the Gemini stuff is not actually that related to, uh.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think is driving the, the, the, like, the massive growth on this particular chart on the Google Trends?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  It's probably just that, like, Google is pushing it really hard. Um, I don't think there's really rate limits. Um.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  The models are like pretty cheap.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it might, yeah, it might be, it might be free tier in India pushing hard, something like that.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, uh, account hello in the chat says there's an Instagram trend in, in India with Gemini and girls wearing saris. That could be enough to, to send it.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, there, there's so many ways that Google can drive.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Adoption of the product. It, it always felt like they were holding back on like really opening the floodgates around Gemini.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, yeah. And we saw some posts from, uh, from folks who work on the Gemini app saying like, the GPUs are on fire, the TPUs are on fire this, this weekend. They're trying to keep it up. Um, I've always thought the gap in functionality was pretty narrow between chat GPT and Gemini. Like both have fast and free options. Both have reasoning models, both have deep, deep research modes, both have image generation. Um, I'm, I, I like, chat GPT is still sticky for a lot of people. Because it's just, uh, it's just default. Like chat GPT is on my home row on my phone, but Gemini is just one, one app above on the homepage. So I'm kind of going back and forth. Um, but, uh.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  The, uh, the, the, but I think, I think the wake up call of like the empire strikes back is really just like, what does it actually mean to be an empire? And we saw a little bit of information come out from, uh, Demis, the founder and CEO, now the CEO of DeepMind. He was talking to David Friedberg at the All In Summit and he said something like they have 5,000 PhDs on staff, which is just an insane amount of PhDs. They're like the docket sign of hiring PhDs. Need to put them all in a, a football stadium just to, just to talk about the plans.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  So OpenAI has six, around 7,000 employees?

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  And DeepMind has like, it's a similar, it's a similar organization, yeah.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  5,000 PhDs.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I think the reason why you see folks like, uh, Bucho Capital guy being so bullish on Google is that they're, they're already vertically integrated, they're already a hyperscaler, so they have their own data centers.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  You just had to look at their, look at, at, at all the different parts of their business.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  The data advantage, the distribution advantage. You know, you can go on and on and on and on.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ben Thompson had a great, uh, post about AI and the big five. So the five big tech companies that are taking AI really seriously. For Google, they have the best infrastructure, they have a good model, they have no partners, they have the best data, they have distribution on Android devices, search, Google Cloud Platform, the core business. Chat, chatbots are disruptive to search. This could be bad, but it also could be like, well, it's the, the, the whole organization needs to be awake because it's, it's obviously a threat. You can't just sit back and go, yeah, that'll probably benefit us. Like you have to move. And scarcity risk, data feedback loops diminished, disruptive or sustaining, it could be disruptive, new business potential in the cloud, says Ben Thompson.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  So, um, there, uh, so I do think that the, the Google bulls might have over rotated a little bit against OpenAI. I saw one quote that accused ChatGPT of, quote, "losing at least $2 for every $1 it spends", which I just don't think makes sense from like an accounting perspective. You can lose $2 for every $1 you make. But if you spend a dollar as a startup and you lose two, like what, what, what, how does that work? Like, can you imagine? Just think about like the actual financials of a business? And think about like, okay, our expenses were $1 million and, and our balance sheet went

• 17:37John Coogan?

  down by $2 million. Like what, what would have to happen? Like, I don't even understand how that's possible. Can you think of a way?

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't that just mean you're spending $3 million? To generate a million dollars?

• 17:46John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. Not, not revenue. They're saying, so losing $2 for every $1 they spend. So expenses are 1 million, losses are 2 million. How, how, how does that happen? Capex maybe? I don't know.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  You're saying how can your costs be bigger than your revenue?

• 18:06John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. It's not revenue. How can your costs be bigger than your expenses?

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Like, like this quote says, losing $2 for every $1 they spend, they spend, not make. I understand lose $2 for every $1 you make. That makes sense. You have $3 in expenses. Very easy arithmetic.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  I, do you think, do you think they just?

• 18:25John Coogan?

  I think it might've just been a typo.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. It might, might've been a typo or maybe it was somebody that doesn't understand accounting, but it, it, it just like mathematically is very, very confusing to me. Um, and so I think people are sort of like running with this a little bit too much. Um, also Brian Merchant wrote that, uh, OpenAI fails to have a discernible business model. And I think that's just crazy. Like the business model is extremely discernible. It's, it's freemium. Like there's a free tier and then there's a paid tier. Like you might not think that the business model is super profitable or it's going to work or they're going to win, but like their business model is not some cra- oh, I don't understand how they make money. It's like, it's freemium. There's a free version and then there's a paid version and they make money off the paid version.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  And they're investing a bunch and they're losing money and you know, this happens a lot in companies. They lose money and then they make money.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  And discovers that a business.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, and so I think people are like, are like, maybe getting over their skis. At least some people are getting over their skis and like, oh, like, no one even knows how OpenAI makes money. Or what their business model plan is.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Something about like paying to like, train the model and they're paying all this money. They're spending money to train the model and then they're still losing money on the model.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was the Dario thing where he was like, we, you know, we spend a billion dollars to train it. And then that billion dollar training run makes two billion over the next two years. And so you add all those up, those are all good, but then you wind up with this like endless pit of money in the short, like in the overall business. But if each business individually was, was very good and made a lot of sense. And then also just on, on the business model side, it's like, it's like they hired Fiji Simo. They're doing ads, like semi-analysis broke it all down. They're going to take a cut of every, of all the commerce that happens in OpenAI, ChatGPT queries.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  That account, that, that, that supplement brand that we were talking about Friday, that's just like printing cash because they're ranked highest in, in ChatGPT.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  It will, that will not continue forever.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  And so like, it, it, it seems like my takeaway is like, Google's executing well. They're, they're seeing a lot of growth in Gemini, they're doing very well there. But it's not like OpenAI doesn't make any sense or ChatGPT is just like, oh, no one knows how it works. Like, it's not this mysterious thing, like OpenAI is still bigger on Google Trends than Gemini in the US. They're still making money from pro plans and, and plus plans. And then they're also going to start taking a cut of commerce that happens on top of ChatGPT queries. So, I don't know. Overall, I mean, it seems that Google is in a great position to stay in the game for the next technological wave.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  At the very least, they'll be able to play in AI duopolies or oligopolies like they do with Android and iOS. They, they, they don't capture a ton of the profits there, but they capture a ton of the business value. And, and also with Google Cloud Platform, it's an oligopoly between Azure.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  My read on Gemini doing well is not that it's bearish for OpenAI at all.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  No.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  It means that it's an extremely important market.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  And there's going to be a number of players that go after it.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Do I think that there's going to be 10 different? Consumer AI, you know, multipurpose consumer AI applications.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  That are, that are amazing businesses now.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  There's going to be a handful.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. The, there was another chart that was going absolutely vertical and it's the adoption of Chinese LLMs. Did you see this? So.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  We do, we gotta give them some credit.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  We gotta give them some credit.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Light.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  So, open, open source models from China are set to overtake the US as downloads surge in use across Hugging Face. The American ecosystem has stalled in growth and the flip is happening right now. And so you can see that Hugging Face downloads for USA-based open source LLM models, growing, I mean, completely vertically. Very exponential growth there, but then China caught up and the flip is happening right now.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  And it's interesting, I mean, there's one take that's like, open source AI will kind of cease to matter in the future. And it's not going to be that big of a deal, doesn't really matter. The, the, the.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  And what's the, what's the argument there? Because I could see, I could see a while, you know, 10, 20 years ago, companies making the same case around open source software broadly. In the long run, open source is not going to matter. And yet it's still super foundational to.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  It is, I, I, I think the argument goes something like, just the value capture around it. So, yes, if you, yes, Linux is like dominant and Linux has a massive install base. But companies that have built their business around Linux, like Red Hat, Red Hat is, is like a unicorn. Maybe like worth 10 billion at various points in time. It's been like taken private and taken public and whatnot. But Red Hat is like one, one hundredth the size of Android or Microsoft or Mac or iOS, right? Like the other, even, even, I mean, Mac built on Unix, so there's like a lot of lineage there.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  But a lot of the, like, the closed source operating systems have captured like 99% of the value. And so I think the, the, the, the hot take on open source not being that valuable is just that there's not that much value capture that happens. Even if like there is pretty wide adoption. I don't know if there's more to it than that. Then there's just like the, who had that take that was like?

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Like the open source, I think this was Tyler Cowen, he said like the, the open source models like, well, if they're distilled from American models, even if they're like Chinese, they still like believe all the American things and they, they wind up like, they wind up believing in free speech and believing in American values just because like, they've been like,

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Trained on the American internet.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Trained on GPT five, exactly, yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  And trained on the American internet. But my question is like, how, how seriously is Google taking open source right now? They have the, they have the open weights, Gemma line of open source models. Do you have an idea here, Tyler?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, yeah, Google just has Gemma. Those are mostly like pretty small models. They, they're used a lot in like, um, like mechanistic interpretability stuff. So it's just like, kind of like toy models.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Um, but, and then there's like OpenAI, they have their own.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  And I mean, Meta is really the only like big player in open source in the US.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. My, my, my take on this is that it feels like there is a, there is a crown in Washington DC that is waiting to land on some big tech executives head for just dominating the American open source AI narrative. And obviously that was OpenAI's branding for a long time. Then they went closed source. They, they have an open source model now, but they're not known as like the leading open source lab, right? Uh, the leading open source lab is arguably DeepSeek or Alibaba with Quin. But you could imagine that you could do a whole victory tour, whole victory lap in DC over saying like, hey, I'm the American open source champion.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  And so I wonder if Google will go for that, or if Mark Zuckerberg at Meta will, will go for that with the next release of Lama and say, hey, I'm taking, I'm still taking this seriously. There's been a lot of rumblings about like, oh, is, is Meta backing off of open source? I think John Lutig wrote-

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would already leaked. They had a conversation. There were conversations internally allegedly around, hey, is this actually important or do we just wanna

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  deliver value for our own customers?

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, can, can they keep, can they keep justifying the CapEx and then open sourcing the results and then, uh, and then handing those, handing, handing out the freebies? Anyway.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Did we want to read through some of these, this post from Zephyr?

• 26:14John Coogan?

  These, this format has been going like giga viral. Have you noticed that? Every, every third post is this.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so be, be Google in 2017. Small team drops quote unquote, attention is all you need. Execs nod politely, go back to selling ads for socks. Let transformer gather dust for five years like vintage Beanie Baby. Be gnome Shazir OG wizard quits, builds AI boyfriend app, character AI. Millions of lonely hearts pay 9.99 to eat a 2B from near. Google HR, any chance you want to come back? Shazir busy, my EGF is calling.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  I don't think this is what happened.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't think this is what happened at all, but it's funny, funny revisionist history. 2022, OpenAI drops ChatGPT, world loses its mind. Google's stock does a bungee jump. Sundar holds all hands, guys, we need a response by Q2. Team ships Bard in three weeks using 12 interns, 2,000 TPUV fours in pure panic. Bard hallucinates, the earth is flat. Did that, did that actually happen? I mean?

• 27:15John Coogan?

  I don't remember that. I, I remember there were some, there were, I, I didn't use Bard.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  I kind of miss the name Bard.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Bard was kind of a great name, but there were so many, there was Palm and, and, and Google was like sort of promoting like their internal research and their external stuff. So they had like product names and then also model names and the model naming convention. It's, it's like way overstated to say that OpenAI is the only one with confusing model name architectures. Because Google had the exact same thing going on with like, with Palm and Bard and all these different.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Even now they have, it's like Gemini 2.0 flash light.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  And then is like, is, is flash better than light?

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Or like Pro 5 is worse than? It's, it's a rite of passage to have naming.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  You have to go through it before you, before you actually just release the one good product, which would probably just be Google.com. Like no, like I, I remember a decade ago, people used to analyze like the updates to the Google.com algorithm. There was one, there was one release that was called like Penguin or something. I forget what it was called, but it, it changed the way search results ranked and it was like disastrous for a bunch of companies that had built SEO around the previous architecture. And then when Google shipped this change, uh, it, it like decimated a whole bunch of businesses. Um, but it goes back and forth. But anyway, Bard was a good name. Maybe they'll bring it back at some point, but I think Gemini is cooking. I think

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Gemini is going to be around for a long time. Uh, and I, and I do think those, I do think they'll go model router. And I think the, the, the, we will not be seeing point fives very long. Um, realistically, all these products should probably go to an annual release cycle and it should just be, uh, yeah, I'm using Gemini 2025, 2026, 2027, like a car. Um, anyway, you want to continue with this?

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Shazir finally answers HR's 47th email. It's funny again, of course.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is not how it works.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  Not, not how it works. Uh, Bard, uh, anyways, fine, but I want my own parking spot and unlimited La Croix return waves hand Gemini two and two and a half drop context window so big it can summarize the Bible and your group chat. Google processing 980 trillion tokens a month equal to 40% of human SMS traffic.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  That's crazy if it's real.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  That is wild. Uh, someone sneezes nano banana into the Play Store overnight. It's number one app turns your.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  I'm not going to read that last part.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to read that last part, folks.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Go find it yourself.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  But, um, uh, this, I, I asked, how would Gemini, the app do in September astrologically? To Gemini, from an astrological perspective, September is a complex and transformative month for Gemini. While it may not have seen the same effortless flow as in Gemini season, it presents a significant period of growth, learning and necessary recalibration.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  It's just like the most classic, like astrological, like generalization to like Gemini is generating this and then reading it and being like, wow, that's, that's actually.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Very funny. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Great to see John Exley back in the chat. We were wondering where he

• 30:31John Coogan?

  World famous now.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  World famous now.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  He's been featured in Business Insider. Thank you so much to John Exley.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes, TBPN was in Business Insider this morning.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  John got the quote.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  I think everyone in this chat is.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of you folks were featured in there, but Julia Hornstein broke down. She, I think, explained and described aura farming and a number of other.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  I think that that was, overall, great piece. I think she kind of missed the definition of aura farming. We'll get Tyler to put it in the truth zone.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tyler.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  That was the one thing where I read, I was like, I don't know if that fully fits Tyler's definition of aura farming, but it was funny to see it printed in the.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  This was.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Business Insider.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  John's best quote was, John Exley, that is, I look at TBPN as an existence of the proof of heaven.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  As existence proof of heaven.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Thank you, John Exley. We appreciate you.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  We appreciate it.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, Ajne Midhass been on Absolute Terror. He posted that AI is eating software across the handful of frontier AI startups that he's a board member in. Year-to-date sales have gone from 1.3 billion to 8 billion. Meanwhile, publics are bleeding. The most, the single most rapid reallocation of value from legacy companies to startups in history. And that's why we're.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Partner with so many of the startups that are taking it to the, to the public.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  I wonder.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  I can't see what any of these companies are, so it's hard to give that creative analysis here.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  One of them is Adobe. Adobe is up 33% this year. It's a $150 billion company.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just wonder how much of these are selling off because of the overall narrative that the gen AI, the labs are basically going to be able to just generate these companies from scratch.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  It's that, but it's also that there really is significant pricing pressure. This is what we were talking to Jim Cramer about with regard to Salesforce. Salesforce is a seat-based model and they need to shift to an outcomes-based, value-based pricing, and that is something that is hard to do in the short term.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's something. So this morning, Trump jumped on Truth Social. He said, "Subject to SEC approval, companies and corporations should no longer be forced to report, to 'report,'" he put it in quotes, "on a quarterly basis." He's a, quote, enthusiast, quarterly reporting, "but rather to report on a six-month basis. This will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies." Did you ever hear the statement that, quote, "China has 50- to 100-year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis?" Not good. They still have quarterly reporting requirements, don't they?

• 33:32John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  It's just more of like a... I imagine if companies only had to report every 50 to 100 years, though.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Could be pretty good.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Imagine waiting. It's like, you have your first Google, your first Palantir earnings as a young man, you know?

• 33:47John Coogan?

  At retirement. At retirement, you're like, maybe earnings.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm riding with Palantir. We'll see. We'll see what, you know, right? It's like, it's like, you get, that one earnings report decides whether you retire.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. At our last earnings, like, Google, Google made...

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Our last earnings before the internet.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Google generated $100 billion in net income last year. Imagine, imagine going from like, the IPO prospectus, "Yeah, yeah, we generated 20 million in net income," to being like, "Yep, we're ready to update you. It's been 20 years. $100 billion in net income. We've done very well. It's a beat. Green candle."

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, regardless of what happens with the SEC, you gotta stay compliant, you gotta get on Vanta, vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first frame or command.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to think like, you know, DJT has his public company.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  He does.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Truth Social.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  He's just like, ah, I'm getting really sick of this. What if I could cut, you know, what if I could cut the management teams, you know, sort of, I do, you know, one, you know, I can see there being some, if this actually gets rolled out.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  There could be some bad side effects.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  Maybe companies get sloppier.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Right, like the quarterly cycles, like a forcing function for, for, you know, just making, you know, continuous progress and running a tight ship and all these things. But if, if, if the burden of being public goes down, maybe more companies go public earlier, right?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  And, and maybe, yeah, CEOs that, that would just have, but again, I just, I'm not sure that it would be.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Well, since we cover earnings, we should be strongly against this because half as much content would be devastating to us.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's, I mean, I don't know, there's, there's plenty of.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  We don't really cover earnings that closely, but it does make for fun, a fun news cycle, getting new data points and new earnings calls, but maybe the podcast world can fill in for that, you know, do a quarterly podcast tour and chat about your business, less quiet periods for sure, right? So, be good on that. Anyway, in other news, The Wall Street Journalist is reporting that China has said that Nvidia violated antitrust law. Regulators move against the chip company comes during Washington Beijing trade talks. We're gonna have Bill Bishop join the stream in seven minutes. China said an initial probe found Nvidia violated the country's anti-monopoly law,

• 36:33John Coogan?

  heightening pressure on Washington during the latest round of US-China trade talks that ended Monday. Beijing's antitrust regulator cited the violations in connection with Nvidia's acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing and didn't elaborate. Beijing approved the deal after Nvidia agreed to conditions, including guaranteeing the supply of its chips to China. But since 2020, the US government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial intelligence chips to China. Nvidia said it complied with law. We will continue to cooperate with all relevant government agencies as they evaluate the impact of export controls.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Beijing's move came just hours before Treasury Secretary Scott Besant told reporters in Madrid that US and Chinese negotiators had reached a framework deal on TikTok following two days of trade talks. If you're not familiar, or you haven't been following it that closely, the TikTok divestiture has been pushed a number of times. We're just reaching the end of the most recent 90-day

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Wednesday?

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Hold. Yes, I believe it's Wednesday. We have two days left. And so US and Chinese negotiators have been figuring out a framework for that. I believe Polymarket has Oracle and Larry Ellison still in the lead. I don't know if you want to pull up the latest data there on what will happen to TikTok, but it is funny that we're hearing so much more about Larry Ellison with the OpenAI deal, which we're going to go into tomorrow.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  They're still sitting at a 43% chance that a TikTok sale is announced in 2025.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, might happen. Of course, there's way more to it. What does the sale actually mean? What will... So, oh, the chart is spiking with a sale. So, yeah, unclear what exactly, what piece of the business would they sell? There's always been this nervousness around, what if they sell the cloud infrastructure contract and the inference? And they say, yeah, you guys can run the app. We decide the algorithm. And of course, a lot of people who are nervous about the effect that TikTok is having on the American populace think it's actually the training of the model that matters a lot more.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  If our, you know, if we were in a You know, Cold War with a country and they owned one of our most popular newspapers.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  Said, hey, we don't really want you doing this. And they were like, oh, it's fine. You can deliver the newspaper.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can take over the printing of it.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can print it.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  We're still going to decide the words that go in it.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Content.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  But.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  You can print.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're going to decide what's on the front page.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  We'll let you.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Let you.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyone can post to this newspaper, but we're going to decide the sorting of the articles. Like, what makes it to the front page is important. And so control of the algorithm should be, but be relevant. And I've talked to some AI researchers who have said that it might be possible to run like a secondary algorithm on top of what algorithm gets shipped over. Do like essentially fine tuning it as it comes over. So, you know, the TikTok algorithm comes over and it's prioritizing one thing. And then you run a secondary feed on top like, and this happens a lot with like, like different, different, you know, you might have a, you might have a secondary algorithm that's, that's running for. Uh, does this violate the, does this violate the terms of service of the app? Is this, uh, is this adult content or something?

• 39:53John Coogan?

  It might still rank very high, but if it triggers the filter, it gets deprioritized after the fact. So there are different ways to go about it and certainly not having the data immediately exfiltrated, uh, seems like a net win. Um, but it is a complex topic. So we'll continue to follow the story as it develops. Um, the two, uh, the two sides, US and China are running up against a Wednesday deadline to do a deal to allow the popular video sharing app to continue operating in the United States. Uh, and it's, it's crazy how big of a story this was, what, last year, maybe the year before? Everyone was beating the drum on ban TikTok and, uh, and it's kind of just melted in the background. People don't really think about it anymore. Um, it's, it's just kind of like become, it's fallen out of the news cycle. Anyway.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Um, Nvidia has become perhaps the highest profile business, business caught in the crossfire of the trade dispute between the world's two biggest economies. The company sells the most powerful chips. Uh, in December, China's antitrust regulator, the state administration for market regulation, opened a probe into Nvidia's $7 billion acquisition of the Israeli networking gear maker.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Melanox Technologies, which I believe was a fantastic acquisition. I think they made a ton of money off that based on what they wound up selling because they bought this company before the AI boom. And then networking gear became incredibly important as they built out these massive data centers with Nvidia GPUs. And so a week earlier, the Biden administration ratcheted up controls on China to access China's access to high end chips. Antitrust lawyers familiar with the case said Nvidia was in a tough spot because it had to halt supply of its most advanced chips for to China to comply with the US export controls. But that opened it up to criticism from Beijing. We will talk to Bill Bishop, who is in the Restream waiting room about everything that's going on in China with regard to Nvidia and elsewhere. So let's bring in Bill Bishop from the Restream waiting room.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  How you doing, Bill?

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Good. How are you?

• 41:48John Coogan?

  I'm fantastic. How are you? Have a good weekend?

• 41:50Bill Bishop?

  I'm good. I had a great weekend and I have to say thank you.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 41:53Bill Bishop?

  And I have to say, Tashi's La Boo Boo.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:56Bill Bishop?

  And I will, I will say that TBN, you, you top ticked the La Boo Boo bubble.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 42:02Bill Bishop?

  Since you said you were sending this, I think Pop Mart stock is down like 20%.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 42:09Bill Bishop?

  The basis are crashing on secondary markets. So it's awesome.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  We did, we did say we were buying it so your dog could rip it apart.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Bill Bishop?

  I actually examined it and decided there might be some toxic, toxic pieces. So I'm keeping it on.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Oh, that's smart. Yeah, yeah.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  That is so smart.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, anyway, we were just reading through this, uh, the latest news on the, uh, the China, uh, saying that Nvidia violated antitrust law. I was wondering if you had, uh, any thoughts and then we can kind of go into just generally give us the update on what you've been talking about on your fantastic, uh, blog, uh, uh, Sinusism. And then also Sharp China, which, uh, is your, uh, podcast, which everyone should go subscribe to. It's in the Stratechery bundle. It's fantastic. But did you see this news? What was your take on the, uh, on the Nvidia antitrust, uh, debate going on in China?

• 43:02Bill Bishop?

  So it's interesting timing. It relates to this Mellanox acquisition from a few years ago and that Nvidia had agreed to certain terms. I think most were public. I think at least one term was not disclosed. And now, you know, the SAMR, which is the anti-monopoly group, is saying that they violated one of the, at least one of the provisions. And the timing, of course, is not coincidental, right? It dropped just as the US and China negotiators were meeting in Madrid. It comes two days or three days after the announcement of investigation into dumping of analog chips, as well as discrimination in the sort of

• 43:42Bill Bishop?

  blocking of sales of certain other chips. And so I think this is, one, I think Nvidia technically could be in a lot of trouble because if they are found to be violating their agreement, I believe they can be penalized up to 10% of their global revenue. In addition, and then have that be multiplied two to five times. So they could be looking at several billions of dollars, several billion dollars of fines from the Chinese government if it proceeds to its conclusion and they're found to be in violation of these, of the agreement. You know, my guess is that this, the timing is, again, not coincidental and it is, it

• 44:20Bill Bishop?

  is part of a, a way to further encourage Nvidia and the US government to pull back on export controls. Yeah. And, you know, clearly Nvidia is already motivated to do that. This may motivate them more. And whether or not then the Chinese government uses this as part of this broader discussion around export controls, that's not clear. Now, in the previous segment, you were talking about TikTok. What was interesting in these discussions was, from the statement so far from the US side, they said that the Chinese tried to bring in export controls or other things, but the US side was solely focused on TikTok. And so, you know, but then they're going to keep talking and they're going to extend the, extend the deadline

• 45:01Bill Bishop?

  for the imposition of additional tariffs and they're just going to keep negotiating. And so I think that this is all part of the positioning on the Chinese side to push back. Back on the US government, the announcement last Friday of this investigation to dumping of analog chips is probably the Chinese getting ahead of what's to be expected of this 232 investigation from the US Trade Representative's Office around legacy chips from China. And so, there's just a lot of moving pieces. I don't think Nvidia is in any trouble immediately because of this investigation, but it just makes their prospects in China a little murkier. And again, I think one of the waypoints for investors to look

• 45:43Bill Bishop?

  at is, assuming President Trump approves this modified Blackwell chip, I think it's the B30 that Nvidia is trying to create to sell to China, it's much better than the H20, it's not as good as Blackwell, but it's much better than anything that the Chinese can make anytime soon. If the Trump administration says, yes, Nvidia will grant you licenses, does the Chinese side actually start buying? Or do they do what they did with the H20 and basically say, we're not going to buy, and we still don't know why they don't want to buy the H20s, but it certainly doesn't look good. That wasn't a good outcome for Nvidia.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's definitely like multi-party interests here with the CCP maybe not wanting a bunch of chips to come in from Nvidia because they want to spur their domestic, homegrown chip manufacturing business. But then the companies Alibaba and DeepSeek, like, these companies just want the best chips to actually compete. And so, there's like a tension there. Is that kind of the correct narrative?

• 46:43Bill Bishop?

  No, that certainly is how I look at it. And I think that, you know, ultimately, and that's why I said, you know, if Trump administration approves the B30, and China still says no, then I think the answer will be that the party, that sort of security forces, the party forces have decided that they are going to just rip off the Band-Aid and try and move faster towards indigenization of chips. If it turns out that actually they start buying B30s in bulk, then maybe the H20 rejection was effectively a ploy, said, no, no, we want the better stuff, right? And so they set up this, sort of made it

• 47:23Bill Bishop?

  look like there's some confusion, but ultimately, it's a benefit to Nvidia. We just don't know at this point. One of the big questions, too, is, you know, certainly a company that would want Nvidia to, and Chinese companies, to not buy Nvidia would be Huawei, right? Because Huawei has the Ascend series, they're the ones who are... Claim they have potentially the best potential ultimate competitor to Nvidia chips is whether or not Huawei has actually been overpromising what they've been able to make, both in terms of actual capabilities and also in terms of production volume.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  Scale.

• 47:55Bill Bishop?

  And yeah, so there's some whispers that the Huawei was sort of blowing smoke up towards the top of the system, that they're further ahead than they are.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there are certain members of the CCP that, and the party broadly, that are extremely AGI-pilled and then others that are just thinking like, you know, this is an extending technology for the internet and it's gonna, we're gonna develop, you know, valuable services and software with it, but we're not building machine god. So we, it's okay if we get sort of set back, if we set ourselves back, you know, five or so years because it's not, you know, necessarily critical to national security.

• 48:35Bill Bishop?

  That's a, that's a great and key question. And I think you look at, I think it was last week or the week before, the Chinese issued this AI plus action plan, which really is more about how to bring AI into a whole bunch of different sectors, a big focus on industrial applications, not at all AGI-pilled. It's really basically how to make AI part of society.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Increase business efficiency.

• 48:59Bill Bishop?

  Yeah, business efficiency, increase governing efficiency, make it better for the police, right? Get AI models for the police to do better predictive policing and better social governance, improve education, improve the healthcare system. Not at all, they don't need the Ferrari of AI models. They don't need the Ferrari of chips. They need good enough. And the question then is, at least on the open source models in China like, like Qwen, like the DeepSeek, are they good enough for what the Chinese need? And that, and are the chips that they're now starting to make in more, more capacity and more volume, are they going to be good enough for what they need? And that ultimately, I think is, you know, if the answer is yes, then Nvidia is probably screwed in China. If the answer's no, then they still have a bit of runway.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Give us the update on TikTok. It feels like... Everyone was, there was like an odd coalition on the left and the right, like last year, everyone was like banned TikTok. It felt like it was a fever pitch. It was a rallying cry for tech execs. And it's like, everyone had a good reason to want to ban it. Like the, you know, a lot of the tech leaders compete with TikTok, whether YouTube reels or

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  X or shorts on Instagram.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  And then there were the security and the China hawks. There were so many people that were saying like, yes. And then the narrative kind of turned to like, well, Trump kind of liked TikTok and it helped him get elected. And he felt like there was a ground swell of support on TikTok. And so maybe he wasn't worried about it. But now we've like kicked it out a couple.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then the, the new kind of potential emerged of, of the, the cloud contracts, which and that felt like the example, I don't know if you heard, but the example we gave is like, if you had a, a, a national, you know, rival, geopolitical rival, and they owned a popular newspaper in your country and you didn't like that. And they said, well, it's okay. We'll let you print the newspaper and we'll let you do like physically distribute it. You'd be like, well, it's not really enough because I want to control, I don't want you controlling what's in the headline and what's on the front page and how the and it feels like if, if we end up with a scenario where like Oracle gets a big, even bigger cloud contract from, from ByteDance.

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  And that's the end of it. That doesn't feel like it's resolved, kind of the key issues that the, the real hawks were, were worried about.

• 51:12Bill Bishop?

  Well, so a few months ago, I had a conversation with one of the drafters of the, of the law that effectively banned TikTok if they didn't meet certain conditions. And this person just said, you know, the only thing we didn't contemplate was a president who didn't enforce the law. And so what's been happening is the extensions that President Trump has been giving, none of them are legal, right? That they are completely blatantly in violation of the law. Doesn't matter, right? And so now though, the, the question is in this particular, you know, today we got the news that they apparently have some framework deal. Trump and Xi Jinping are going to talk about it on Friday, is whether or not the framework deal. involves both the ByteDance share going below 20% of NewCo or whatever they're going

• 51:56Bill Bishop?

  to call it, and that the Chinese side, the ByteDance, has no input, no connection to the algorithm. And so, because the law is very clear, and actually, a few months ago, some of the investors in this mooted sort of consortium that was going to create this NewCo to buy out TikTok US, they were trying, they were lobbying on Capitol Hill to get a sentence inserted in any bill that would take it to effectively indemnify them against breaking the law. Because they understood, you know, they're potentially putting billions of dollars at risk, they are smart enough, they don't want to actually do that in a deal that technically is in violation of a law on the books that survived a Supreme Court challenge, right? Nine to zero. And so, you know, this is, I think, if what we've, and we don't have really any details

• 52:41Bill Bishop?

  yet of what the Chinese and US sides agreed to today in Madrid, but if it turns out that the Chinese side, the ByteDance is going to go below 20%, and, for example, the US, the NewCo is going to have to rewrite the algorithm, then it probably, and there's no data connection, there's no technical connection to China, it's logically, physically separated from anything that touches China, then that deal probably works. But then, what is TikTok, who's going to write the new algorithm? I mean, last, I heard machine language engineers are like expensive and hard to find these days.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and we have some of the smartest.

• 53:16Bill Bishop?

  Who's going to do it?

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have some of the smartest engineers in the world at YouTube and Instagram, like trying to make the algorithm as good as people report TikTok is.

• 53:25Bill Bishop?

  Right.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  And I think that, uh...

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of an olive branch can be given on the cap table, because there's a lot of American investors who invested in ByteDance or TikTok have huge stakes. Jeff Yass at Siskohana is a good example, 15% owner share.

• 53:41Bill Bishop?

  Bill Ford at General Atlantic has a big job.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, General Atlantic. And so, like, there's a very, like, neutral outcome here where you say, oh, well, like, you have this massive stake, we don't want you to take this huge write-down, you can just have an even bigger stake in the US, in the US entity, and so, that's probably even more valuable, and you get your money out of China, so you have more liquidity, you can IPO the company, there's a lot of things that you can do there, and it's not value-destructive.

• 54:05Bill Bishop?

  Well, that's... One of the things it probably does is it probably unlocks, if this deal gets done, it probably helps if ByteDance wants to, helps them sort of clear the path to an IPO in Hong Kong. Sure. Which, and again, the US, of all the investors, I mean ByteDance, I think in the last private round was valued at like 500 billion, right? So there's a lot of money at stake here. You mentioned Oracle, you know, to assuage US regulators' concerns, Oracle and ByteDance had gotten together, they'd done this thing called Project Texas, where they were gonna segment out all the US user data. They proposed that they would actually review the code, the algorithm code, even though the algorithm would be updated from China, they would have engineers who could go through the code and make sure it wasn't being manipulated.

• 54:47Bill Bishop?

  That didn't satisfy the national security concerns, that's one of the reasons why the law was passed last April, in April 2024. There had been talk earlier this year of a Project Texas 2.0 to kind of cut a deal, but ultimately, I think there were enough people in the GOP on the Hill who made it clear to the Trump administration that actually that wasn't gonna fly because it still was in violation of the law that passed last April. And so, so really, I think, again, we'll see what has come out of this. What's interesting too is how the US side made this TikTok the focus of the negotiations this time. Not soybeans, you know, there's an article in the Washington, or New York Times today about how soybean farmers are about to go bankrupt because China's not buying soybeans.

• 55:32Bill Bishop?

  That wasn't the focus, the focus was TikTok. And because, you know, you think about it, there's only upside for the president, right? And the investors, because now if TikTok is saved, TikTok is beholden to the president, it's another algorithm that probably, you know, has favorable feelings towards President Trump. He's helped a bunch of big investors, including Oracle. It's an interesting moment, when, like you said, a year and a half ago, people were going nuts across the aisle about how dangerous TikTok was, and now it's like, eh, okay, whatever. As long as it abides by the law, whatever.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Give me the broader update on what's happening in Beijing and Xi Jinping's like grip on power. There's been some rumors that maybe he's losing control. There's always rumors. Like, how are things just overall looking there? He was recently caught on a hot mic saying he's gonna live to 150, which I think is like a very-

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Watching a little too much Brian Johnson.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  So I'm wondering like-

• 56:29Bill Bishop?

  Honestly, I think those, I mean, those rumors, from what we can see, there's nothing to them. And what we saw at the, you know, the big parade on September 3rd, some other personnel stuff, there's just people, every, every year, there are these rumor cycles. They came earlier this year, but every year, they turn out to be BS, and so far, they're looking like BS.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  Trump said this morning that he thinks that, he thinks companies in the US shouldn't have to report quarterly. He referenced Chinese companies thinking on a 50 to 100-year time horizon, yet Chinese public companies do have to report quarterly. Do you know if, do you know if, are, I mean, is it, is it common for, you know, public company management teams in China to say like, you know, we just missed on everything this quarter, but let's look at this at 100 years, let's zoom out a little bit, is that-

• 57:27Bill Bishop?

  No, that's, that's, that's one of those true social posts that just, who knows where it came from.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  I was saying it's probably Trump, Trump has a public company. He's like, realizes how, how laborious quarterly reporting is for his team, and he wants to free them up to work on product.

• 57:44Bill Bishop?

  And now, and now the lobbyists for like the accounting firms and the lawyer, the law firms are gonna be cycling up in DC, like, wait a minute, we make more money on a quarterly basis.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  No, no, this is importantly, quarterly reporting is their business. Yeah, there's definitely some people that are indexed to that. We were joking about that. We cover earnings. We want as many earnings reports as possible. We like that.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's do daily, daily earnings reports. So CEOs can say, you know, take that day's revenue and say, we're at, you multiply it by 365, and that's your run rate.

• 58:12Bill Bishop?

  So basically, just have a public view of like your zero or ramp or whatever your accounting system is?

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yep, there you go.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  What's the latest, any updates on the export tip, donation, tax, whatever, whatever it was with Nvidia?

• 58:27Bill Bishop?

  The 15%?

• 58:28John Coogan?

  15% for the big man.

• 58:30Bill Bishop?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Bill Bishop?

  No.

• 58:36Bill Bishop?

  So I think, but again, I think what, you know, a broader perspective there. Last week, a nominee for an important position at the Department of Commerce is BIS, which oversees export controls. His nomination was withdrawn. He was somebody who's quite hawkish on chip, like, high-technology exports to China. There, right now, the Nvidia, the chip firms are, I think, feeling like they're in a pretty good position here in DC. And there's, I think, going to be a lot more pressure to try and roll back a bunch of these export controls. I think that the actions from the Chinese side, maybe potentially Nvidia today, that

• 59:17Bill Bishop?

  announcement, but then the announcements last Friday, also may give ammunition here to the folks who are proponents of rolling back those chip export controls to further push the White House to say, this is not working. We need to take a different approach. And so that ultimately would be good for a lot of these chip companies. Again, back to the Nvidia conversation, the question is, will the Chinese still buy the better Nvidia chips? And I mean, I think they'd be crazy not to, but again, this is not necessarily an economic or technical decision solely.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Totally. What are you, when will we have clarity, or will we have clarity on the conversations in Madrid?

• 59:55Bill Bishop?

  So I think the call Friday should, you know, supposedly Xi and Trump are talking Friday. After that, potentially, we'll get more information. So far, there have been, you know, both negotiating teams gave statements, and there's been a little bit of leaking of the press, but there's nothing, like, specifically around TikTok, there are just very, very few, if any, details, other than there's some sort of a framework agreement. And you guys, I mean, you guys have been in the tech world for a long time. What does a framework agreement really mean? And how is it legally binding? And sort of where, you know, it sort of feels like you say framework when you still haven't figured out all the details.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Well, we'll be watching closely.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  We have concepts of a plan.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  I don't, yeah, I don't like these private phone calls between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. I would prefer a podcast. I want them to sit down together with.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  A Substack Live, live Substack. TBPN, right?

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Open invitation to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. If you want to come hash it out live on TBPN, we're happy to host you. You can discuss the plan, the concepts of a plan, the framework for the plan. We'd be happy to have you. And it has been great having you, Bill. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Have a great rest of your day, Bill. Cheers. You too. Thanks.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  See you. Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And Tim Cook was on the red carpet flogging iPhones like a guy selling knockoff pocket watches from under his jacket. Let's play this video. iPhone 17, tell me all about it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. I'm so excited. I'm so excited that you brought it up. This is the 17 Pro Max and in this beautiful cosmic orange, it's a totally new design. It was re-engineered from the inside out. It's the most pro phone we've ever designed.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  16 is pretty good.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  The 16 is good, but the 17 is a must.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  I love it. That's why you gotta give him a raise.

• 1:01:52Jordi Hays?

  That's give him a raise.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Give him a raise. Give him a raise.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Stocks up almost 1%.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  He's not taking days off. He's not being, he's not underselling.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  The market loves it.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  The market loves it. I love it. He's, he's a, what is this? The Emmys? The Emmys? Which I believe is for, what is the Emmys? It's for TV, movies? I think it's an award, it's an award show. I don't know. I don't follow this stuff.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question for.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, it's TV because we're going for a daytime Emmy. We want, we.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  For your consideration.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  That is Dylan Abbrascato's number one KPI. Get us a daytime.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  I love to see Tim out there selling.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Every single person.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  At a company should be selling.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  And it starts at the top.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you don't, and you don't soft play it. You're not like, oh, yeah, you know, it's, it's just another year. No. It's the best iPhone ever. It's the thinnest, lightest, best, biggest, fastest, awesomest iPhone in history. It's a must. So.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  You love

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  You gotta have it.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  It's pretty good. The last one, pretty good.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  But this one

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Must. It's good. But I mean, he is right. It is re-engineered. They, there's that whole, you've heard about the vapor chamber thing? A single, a single drop of water inside the iPhone. Did you hear this? Oh, it's amazing. So, inside the iPhone, there's a single drop of water in a chamber and it heats up, evaporates and moves to a different part away from the hot internals to cool the phone. And this has been one of the complaints for the last few years. I haven't had any problems with heat on this phone on the 16, but

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  My phone, my phone

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Overheats?

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Overheats all the time.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Is it, do you, do you find that it overheats when you're like using software on the phone?

• 1:03:31Jordi Hays?

  Camera.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Camera? Oh, filming or video?

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Photos.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Photos? Just taking photos?

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  And you, you notice it overheating?

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Wow, that's wild.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't turn off?

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  It just heats up a little bit and it feels hot in your hand. Well, that should be a thing of the past with your new iPhone 17 Pro Max in orange.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm excited to

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Do you think that the orange color is a nod to YC or Stratechery? What were they going for? Or Bitcoin? Which one do you think they were going for?

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Probably nod to Ben Thompson over at

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Probably Ben Thompson.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Probably

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  So a hat tip.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ben Thompson's been covering the, the, the, the stock for, uh, what, almost two decades? He's done a lot of great reporting on Apple and, uh, why not give him a little nod with the Stratechery orange iPhone?

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Uh, or the McLaren orange. What else is orange? I don't know. There's a lot.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Andrew Cote says, I propose a technology brother pilgrimage to Starbase to look at rockets, feel better about the world and maybe throw a giant warehouse party or something. Maybe go

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  We could pull this off. He runs, uh, a hard tech conference in San Francisco. I didn't have a chance to go last year, but, uh, they I, wait, was it, it was on like a, like a, on an aircraft carrier or something. He, he got, he really pulled out all the tech bro little touches. I believe there were cyber trucks on top of a, uh, on top of a, uh,

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Aircraft carrier?

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Carrier and there were sponsors and stuff and everyone's bringing stuff.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  I would like to have a house party in a nuclear submarine.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  House party, some flip cup or some beer pong.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  In the, in the nuclear sub. The nuclear sub, it's pretty tight quarters. Have you ever been on a Navy ship?

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  I have. It's not, it's not.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, you can, you can, it could be a really, you light it properly. It could be a really fun vibe, you know?

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  But going to Starbase makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty sure you can just go.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-four hour, twenty-four hour trip, Starbase in the morning.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Abilene, Texas in the afternoon.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Stargate, Stargate, Starbase.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Within a Crusoe data center.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  It'll be fun. Well, get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data. Over two million users trusted by individuals.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be three million at this point.

• 1:05:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to update that for sure. Uh, anyway.

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Rahul posted yesterday.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  This is a great post.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  On a Sunday, bad day to be a manual workflow.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  I don't even know what inspired that. I guess he was just automating things.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  It's a Sunday. He's grinding.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  He's automating workflows. That's great. What more do you need? Uh, Base is beginning to explore a network token. We're in the early phases. This is from the official Base account. That's Coinbase's, uh, new, uh, product. Uh, we're in the early phases of exploration and don't have any specifics to share around timing, design, or governance. We're committed to bridging the community, bringing the community along with us and building in the open. Brian, Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder of Coinbase says, we're exploring a base network token. It would be, it could be a great tool for accelerating decentralization, expanding creator and developer growth in the years.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Base is interesting. It's a blockchain without a, without a native token.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Yes. And we asked Brian Tom, uh, Brian Armstrong about that at the Base launch event. And he said, no comments right now. No, not, no news to share. But, uh, that was a question that everyone was asking us to ask because it did seem like there might, there might be a logical conclusion of this project. Uh, is to eventually decentralize the, the, the project. Um, so there's no definitive plans. Stay safe out there. Don't go buy, uh, the wrong base token. Getting, get too excited, but, uh, interesting development from.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Brian Armstrong over at Coinbase. So, congrats to them on the progress. And congrats to Fall Generative Media Platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place to develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Bill Gates, someone resurfaced Bill Gates's resume as a freshman at Harvard. The resume and experience is still probably better than 99% of college students in tech out there. And so, it says, "His objective was to become a systems analyst and systems programmer." On his resume, he puts his height and weight, 5'10", 130. What a hilarious thing to put on your resume.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Is that to make you more interesting from a like a health insurance standpoint? It's like, hey, my caring costs is not going to be that high.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, free lunches, I'm not going to be doing double protein. I'm just a hundred, I'm just a buck thirty when I'm wet and wearing boots. He says, "No dependents." He wants a $12,000 salary, but he's open to whatever, and he's open to relocating.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Needs at least 12 grand, he's open to 120 billion.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Look at this resume, his experience, he knows Fortran, he knows COBOL, he knows BASIC, he knows machine languages for most of the above computers, less.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Or he even built a payroll product.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Traffic flow analysis system, school scheduling, payroll. He's a systems programmer, and in partnership with Paul Allen, of course, the co-founder, "Designed and put together a system for traffic engineers to study traffic flow. The system is built around Intel's MCS8008 microcomputer. The software and hardware setup has been fully tested using a prototype. Demonstrations to customers are planned for May 1974." Wow. Information sciences, fun. I wonder how that surfaced. Like, when did he publish this? Did someone else, did someone else publish this, leak this? I don't know.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. He was like working with a recruiting services firm.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Probably a good client for them. Seems like he would have had a lot of options.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 1:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Junk bond analyst, we already covered this. Screenshot of the Truth Social post about subject to SEC approval.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  This seems...

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  But the SEC, yeah, I mean, we're gonna need to see the art, like, why?

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Report. Report.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  It's funny to say, like, uh, put it in quotes because like it very much is definitely a report.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  It's a real report on a quarterly basis. And then also in parentheses, so it's subject to the SEC approval. Companies and corporations should no longer be forced to report on a quarterly basis. Parentheses, quarterly reporting exclamation point. Like, why are you putting this in parentheses? But rather report on a six month, six, and then six in parentheses, month basis, in case you couldn't read S I X. I really don't understand the, the, the, the texture of this. This is definitely not L L M generated.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  This is. Yeah, it'd be interesting if it ends up being like the exact same amount of work, right? Like the report, it's the six month report just like doubles, you know, doubles in terms of how intensive it is. And the function is that the lawyers and the accountants get paid exactly the same amount.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  This is a wild post. Did you ever hear the statement that, quote, China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company? Whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis, question mark, question mark, question mark, not good, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And it doesn't close the quote. Like, there's no, there's no end to that quote. And also, since when have we been looking to China for best practices on anything? I thought, I thought we were like near peer adversaries. Very, very odd. Um, anyway. Elon Musk has purchased over 2.56 million shares of Tesla worth $1 billion. The purchase happened on September 12th with an average price of $389.22. This is Elon's first open market stock purchase since February of 2020.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  He is squarely in the one, one trillion club.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  What do you mean?

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Tesla.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Oh, Tesla stock.

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  The, the market cap is currently 1.28 trillion.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that only a little while ago, it feels like Meta was at like one, one, like, you know, just, just north of that.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I feel like there, there's, there's gonna be news here, uh, especially around.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  RoboTaxi?

• 1:11:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there, there was also news, X, X A I terminated like 500 employees over the weekend.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Which, again, I don't, I don't wanna like read too much.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Put on the tinfoil hat, bro. Go crazy. Give me, give me the theory. He buys the stock.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  The stock goes up.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Stock.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  And then use that to merge in XAI. That would be the, the 3D chess if something, if something crazy happens.

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Like that. Uh, yeah. I mean, obviously Tesla, fantastic AI team built self-driving, like one of the best, if not the best.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The employees that were laid off were, were doing like.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Like data labeling, right? Which, which can be.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Probably non-equity comped.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and increasingly there are tons. Yeah. It's interesting because there's, there's been tons of competition in that space between scale, Merckor, handshake. Uh, what's that other one? It's not Volt. It's like, uh, Surge. So there's, there's a few.

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Turing, Merckor, Surge.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  So there's a few companies that are outside contractors.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Label box.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Label box. Yeah. I just heard a label box ad on Dorkesh. It's fantastic. Um, the, uh, the, so, so, so like this is a service that you can very much buy from a highly competitive market and effectively outsource that role. Uh, a few companies have brought it in, in-house. It seems like XAI is going from in-house to outsourced. Um, but I think not too much to read into on the XAI side. There was, there was a post in here. Maybe we can pull it up, but let me see. It's deeper, deeper, deeper. The, uh, yeah. So another one of those posts by Zephyr.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Zephyr's really been on a tear. 1.4 million views on this post. Be Elon, co-found OpenAI for humanity. Watch Altman flip it into Microsoft's loot box. Quietly.exe. Launch XAI, poach, poach, poach the best GPU whispers from defined opening. Yes.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Meta.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Bottomed at 1.23 trillion this year.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. This year.

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  And now, this year.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  And now Zuck is, uh, sorry, sorry, Elon. Is like is is north of that today.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, says, uh.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Considering the the revenue and earnings difference between those two companies, it says a lot about Elon's ability to make people believe and and give them like optionality on so many different tech trends.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  He's making transformers, they're making chips.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a very, I I feel like the market still very much believes that self-driving cars will be a thing and it'll be big and Tesla's leading and in that market and or, you know, at the top of it. And same thing with robot, with robots, like, you know, we grew up watching sci-fi films, or some of us did, I don't know if you did, but watching sci-fi films of robots, if robots are a thing, Elon is going to figure out a way to make money on it. So that's always been the the the story in recent history of Tesla's bull case and certainly Elon's betting on that. But the bull, the bull case for XAI, this is the data that came out from OpenRouter, which I was talking to Tyler about a little

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  bit over the weekend. So Grok Code Fast 1 is now the number one ranked model on OpenRouter with 1.06 trillion tokens generated. Claude Sonnet 4 is at 343 billion tokens. GPT-5 is down at 72 billion tokens. And I sent this to Tyler and was like, I don't believe that Grok is four times bigger than Claude and and 10 times bigger than GPT-5. Like, this just doesn't seem right. And Tyler kind of broke it down for me, what's actually happening on OpenRouter. So can you explain when people use OpenRouter, what type of data would be included in this particular data set versus the broader LLM inference market?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, is my mic on?

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're good.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  My my thesis is basically like. You use OpenRudder when you're doing kind of low intelligence but like high volume things when price matters a lot. Because if you look at the like the top models, a lot of them, there is like Claude, there is Gemini, but then you see a lot of open source models, which are like super cheap to inference. So like, at least for me, whenever I use, like I do a bunch of inference on different models, whenever I use like OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini, I'm usually hitting their like actual API, I'm not using OpenRudder.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Directly.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, because like maybe there's some sense where like there's different params that aren't actually exposed via the OpenRudder API or something like that. I think it's probably generally true for a lot of people. But if I'm using, if I just need like super cheap intelligence, then I just go into OpenRudder. I see, okay, this is like a pretty good model, it's like super cheap, I'll just hit that. And then sometimes if that, if the inference is like super slow, I just, I can really easily switch to a different open source model.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  So that's kind of my thesis. So it's also why, if you look at the kind of total like tokens inference, it's like, okay, Claude Sonnet 4 is at 500 billion of the past week, which if you kind of map out like what the actual like revenue is from that.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  It's like a super tiny amount of what their revenue like is probably if you kind of like think there's some numbers leaked.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  The leaked numbers for Anthropic are, it's around $4 billion a year in business, probably more now. So you, you, you work backwards and you get to like, they should be making like 250 million a month. And this data only accounts for something like 12 million dollars of that 250. So the, the, the actual frame is like 95% of their business or something like that. 90% of their business is happening directly on their API. And then 5% of their business is happening in OpenRudder.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, or something like that. I didn't include the, the input tokens, which is like about, it's like 10x cheaper. So it's like, at least in that order of magnitude.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  But it's significantly less than like what it should be where like, I, I've used Grok a fair amount via API. Or I've never used it through Grok's API. I've only used it through OpenRouter.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  So I think that's probably true. Also, like, one of the reasons you might see Grok code Fast One being super high is that, at least since its release, I think it's still free in Cursor and Klein.

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  And I don't know if they're using OpenRouter. They're using some kind of router in the back, right? Because you can.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Cursor is?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, obviously, because you can select like Grok or Anthropic or.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Well, isn't that just their own router?

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  It could be.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  But they could be sitting on top of them.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like very easy to use it, so. I think those are some of the reasons why you might see.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I think.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Really outperforming here.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  I think this, this post, this is, is sort of like, you know, meme incendiary written for virality.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  The default story it's telling is like, oh yeah, like Grok is, you know, 10 times bigger than OpenAI. And that's probably not right, but.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Charts are great for marketing.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  And whether you're hitting number one globally in the app store.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Here, where your charting matters a lot, right? And it's natural for, for companies to share the charts that are, that are good.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  When they're good.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  When they're good.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:19:37Jordi Hays?

  And they're just snapshots too. And charts, yeah, charts are.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  And, and so what is this actually, what was the actual interpretation here? Like, they're winning on OpenRouter, which means that they're, like, Grok has successfully delivered a level of intelligence that is affordable and.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say like, I would almost put this model

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  comp it to like just open source models, like Quen or something, rather than like kind of the, the.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Frontier reasoning.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Frontier reasoning models.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  So you could say they're, they're winning kind of in that field, even though it's not open source. It's still in that similar like price range.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Yep. There does seem to be value in, in soaking up some of the demand that's further down the cost curve for maybe more price sensitive users.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could also be like, I mean, the model is still good enough where like, even if it's, if it's worse on a single shot compared to like cheap D5, if you just run it 10 times, it still will be a little bit cheaper. And you're like kind of at a similar spot. So where you can just kind of max out on volume instead of. Like your your intelligence per token is less, but if you just run way more tokens, then you're at similar intelligence and it'll still be cheaper.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  So maybe there's some kind of factor there.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  So like lightly bullish for the XAI team. They've clearly built something that people want at a specific price point.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  It's definitely good. Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen like, I don't really use like the newest Grok model, like their frontier one. Is it three?

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  I guess three.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Three.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  I I almost never use it.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  So this is maybe like one of the first examples of of Grok models like really being used a lot.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the company. Yeah, the the the roll up theory is kind of interesting to to toy with. There's a bunch of imagine X, the everything app integrated with Tesla. That's a funny, funny outcome if that's what happens.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Basically forced to buy a Tesla.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  I would definitely buy a Tesla. I mean, buy one and then take it to the shop and manual swap it and naturally aspirate V12 in there.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  What if they what if they just came out and said you you you you can't use X when you're moving fast unless you're inside of a Tesla? Force people to transition.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Out of traditional cars.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Be good.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  That's the next that's the next catalyst for for the next five million.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  I really hope Tesla ships the Roadster. I saw someone on the on the timeline, maybe a week or two ago, talking very, very sad, like a super Tesla bull owns multiple Teslas, owns the stock, saying that they canceled their their Roadster two reservation after maybe eight years of waiting, something like that. And I'm.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Didn't they have to put down like a hundred bucks?

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. The the Roadster was like was like over 10 grand.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so a real, real deposit.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  But also you hear this crazy stat where people are like, well, if you'd put it in Tesla stock instead, it would be worth five million. And it's like, well, that's not really like a fair comparison. The Cybertruck reservation was like a hundred bucks, but the Roadster two was, I mean, it's, you know, I think people knew that it was going to be several hundred thousand dollars, supercar territory. But it just hasn't hasn't moved. But I think that they should do it. I think it'd be good. They need they need a halo car. The Cybertruck's kind of working as a halo car, but the the design language is a little bit, little bit too disparate from the core portfolio, where if you see, if you see an Audi R8. You're like, oh, Audi's cool. Maybe I'll get an A4, right?

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Like, because there's some styling cues that are the same. But if you walk into the Tesla dealership and you see a Cybertruck, you're not like, yeah, Model 3 really like speaks that language, right? It's like they're wildly different designs. So maybe if over time, the 3 and the S and the X and the Y, they all update to have a little bit more of that Cybertruck language. The Cybertruck could work as a halo car, but right now it feels like a very different car from like a very different like brand world, essentially. It's cool, but I'll have to see. In other Elon news, Perfroc 4 is their smartest, the Boring Company posts. The smartest, fastest, safest tunnel boring machine in the next iterations. 5, 6 and 7 are already being built at the Boring Company factory in Texas.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Goal is continuous mining and zero people in tunnels, Z-Pit. And they're hiring exceptional mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software engineers.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  The Boring Company has just not gotten really any attention for the last few years. And it's so funny to think about a world where you look up and you see, you know, starships being launched. And if you could look down, there'd just be, you know, tunnel boring machines everywhere. But this one's a sleeper. I hope to see, I hope to see more out of them.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's tough. It's heavily regulated to build stuff underground.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  Not going deep enough.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Takes a long time, but...

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  If you go deep enough, the regulators won't know.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I heard one interesting thesis that was like, it's just like the underground domain is like, it is a resource. It's essentially real estate if you can build stuff down there, even if it's just a tunnel. And that's extremely valuable because it's effectively free. Like, it's a free resource.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  Just like space.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, I'm not gonna pretend like you're supposed to know this. Can you try to figure out, like, who regulates once you get? Because I would assume like 100 feet below your property is like probably like there's some traditional property law.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would think that there's nothing...

• 1:25:13Jordi Hays?

  If I could dig a tunnel down there, I would just assume that I have some ownership over what happens there. But I think if you go deep enough, I mean, is that not like the play?

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  What would you be okay with? If if if some random person was like, Jordy, hey, I got a tunnel, I'm I'm building a tunnel under your house. Don't worry, it's 500 feet. Would you be like, yeah, cool? Or would you be like, I would prefer not to have that happen?

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  500 is fair game.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  500 is fair game?

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  As long as if they can prove out safety, right? I don't I don't want any type of collapse.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  I like the level of which my home is at.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  And the old and the Ultra Dome.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to suddenly feel a jolt.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Fall through the earth.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I don't know. Um, I have yet to tour the the the the Boring Company Tunnel. They built one in Las Vegas as kind of a demo. There's been a few that have built, but I mean, this is one of those businesses that I think has just been building, building, similar to Neuralink, like working, chopping wood, grinding, grinding stone in the earth. And yeah, maybe something happens here. Tyler, did you get any closer to an answer on how unregulated the underground domain, the subterranean domain is?

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Yes. So, um, this is ChatGPT. It says courts generally say that you can go, you you own the ground beneath your land only to the extent that you can reasonably use it.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  So there was a court case in 1946. The Supreme Court rejected the to the center of the earth doctrine.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  So you don't just own everything below you.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  Um, so usually it's like, maybe 1,000 feet is kind of the extent and then below that is just, I guess it's just free free rein.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Do you know this?

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  You're not using the, you're not using more than a 10 feet below your, I'm sorry, Tyler. The second you have property, I'm I'm burrowing a tunnel underneath it. I'm gonna be hanging out under there and you're gonna have to prove that you can get down there.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  I do think that there's a massive market for bat caves. You know, it's very hard to do ADUs. ADUs are booming now in California, but it's still hard to actually go and add real estate to a house. We have a housing crisis. Why not just have the the tunnel company come build and just be like, hey, we we built you the perfect man cave underground your house, under your house. If you want us to build a little tunnel up to your, uh, your bedroom that you can climb down and go enjoy your new movie theater.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being like an angry teenager getting in a fight with your your parents about like?

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  I'm going to the man cave.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to eat this for dinner.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  I'm going to the back cave.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  And then you just go in the tube and you go.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  And then you're down in the back cave. Huge, huge untapped market if they can figure it out.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  They don't understand me above.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  Do you know the story of the, the subway that goes out to Harvard University in Cambridge?

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  I do not.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  This is fascinating. So, uh, the MTA, the Massachusetts MBTA, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, built a subway that goes from Boston out to Cambridge. And when they built it, they wanted it to go through Harvard, Harvard's territory, Harvard's land. And it would have been a straight shot to get from Boston to Harvard. But when you're on the actual subway, it slows to a crawl at one point and starts, the wheels screech and go as you're going around this weird curve. And I was very unclear on why the metro, that why the subway needed to take a curve when you can clearly draw a straight line between,

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  you know, the logical places to go from Boston to Cambridge to get off and go to Harvard University. And the reason is that Harvard does own the ground underneath. And the reason that they, they did a deal. And do you know who they did a deal with?

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Probably some baron?

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Uh, close. He wasn't a king. It was our first president, George Washington.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  So they got in a, they got in a legal battle and the Harvard administration fights the Boston Transportation Authority and the government.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  The Boston Transporter?

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  And the Boston, yeah, the Boston Transportation Authority says, uh, we have eminent domain. We, uh, we, you know, we own the land. We, we, we govern this land. You need to let us build this, this subway in a straight line. It'll be better for everyone. Harvard says, no. And we have, uh, we have proof that we actually controlled the land all the way down to the bedrock. Uh, and our evidence is a letter that is signed by George Washington, who said, I grant you this land. And it held up. And so the subway had to go around.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Mogged. And honestly, super inconvenient to Harvard students. And I don't know why Harvard wasn't just like, yeah, obviously build it in the convenient way. But there are probably other considerations. Anyway. TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Happy birthday to Casey Hanmer, friend of the show. It's been 15 years in this incredible country. He says it's his American birthday. On September 14th, 15 years ago, 2010, he became a US citizen. He says he feels like he's still getting started.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  Incredible addition to the squad. Thank you to Casey Hanmer for all that you do for America. Let's play that American eagle sound.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  Happy birthday, Casey. In other news.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Do 150 more.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, do 150 more. In other news, debate continues to rage between Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  This account we're featuring here.

• 1:30:49John Coogan?

  Just calling balls and strikes.

• 1:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. This is media at its best.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  This is journalism.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Not conflicted at all. So Palantir hotline with a target says CEOs will do the math and would rather pay Palantir 10 million to make save 100 million instead of pay CRM 5 million to break even or worse. Value creators greater than value extractors. So not conflicted at all.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Not conflicted at all.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Totally unbiased.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  And this is a post from John, who was excellently clipping our Alex Karp interview.

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  This is such a great quote.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  He says, I'm so inspired. So Marc Benioff tried talking smack with Kramer and saying, you know, we're winning deals. Karp fired back on TVPN and now Benioff is taking the high road. He says, I'm so inspired by that company, not just because they have 100x multiple on revenue, which I would love to have.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Dude, are you pulling up?

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  I'm pulling up the video.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Let's go. It's in the chat now. They're going back and forth. I mean, there is a real discussion. We talked about it earlier in the show about how Salesforce positions its revenue model, how the market will treat that in the short term. Benioff and Jim Cramer had a back and forth on Mad Money, talking about how Salesforce, you know, actually makes money and charges the customer. And yeah, there is a question about where both these companies go. It's a big battle. Anyway, let's pull up the clip of Marc Benioff talking to CNBC about Palantir.

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  You know, an idea out there, and you see it in the valuation of the company, Palantir, this idea that that's the future of software. It's disrupting software and it's doing so without a marketing team.

• 1:32:43Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh. I am so inspired by that company. I mean, not just because they have 100 times, you know, multiple in their revenue, which I would love to have that too. Maybe they'll have 1,000 times on their revenue soon. But the prices that they charge to their customers, I mean, it's got to be the most expensive enterprise software I've ever seen. I've been like looking at their demos this week saying, my gosh, how do they get these prices? Because I thought I had analytics, I thought I had data management, maybe I'm not charging enough.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  And you're competing with them.

• 1:33:15Speaker 06

  We compete with them. In fact, we just won a huge deal at the US Army against them.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Insane, insane. Benioff's a legend.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  We're hoping to have him on the show next month. We're working on it. But that is insane levels of cope.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:33:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is guy notorious for selling expensive software.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Is angry that someone else is charging more money.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Selling more expensive software. That's a good point, yeah.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  When, yeah, on a long, you know, on a long enough time horizon, this is about the value that you deliver to customers.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  You need to deliver more value than you capture.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  And Palantir's got a fantastic pitch.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  They have fantastic, you know, I mean, we were at AIP Con, we talked on air and off air with people that are using. Palantir stack and and it's not I I think in you know they obviously compete in a real way but there's also plenty of companies on Palantir stack that are not even in conversations with Salesforce around a bunch of different use cases.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was about to say that. It does feel like Palantir's position themselves completely differently from a product perspective in terms of what they do. People think sales, I mean, the ticker is CRM. And so when I hear about like an army deal, I'm like, are they are they getting a CRM? Like, but I but I guess that they're just so big at this point, they can do a lot of different stuff.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  The company C3.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, C3.ai.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  They have the ticker AI.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  AI.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, Marc Benioff should buy them just to get the AI ticker to come into the next era.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, just re just rebrand your ticker. There's been a lot of ticker foo. People, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg with the Meta rebrand, getting your your your core brand on the theme or defining the theme is is somewhat of an underrated strategy. It's like a good dot com, a good ticker, that that people can just go and say, I want I want exposure to AI. I'm getting C3 AI. I want exposure to CRMs. I'm getting dollar sign CRM.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  That's that's a potentially new fund with the strategy of just investing based on the narrative surrounding the narrative that you construct around the ticker.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  I need an AI. I need an AI company.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:35:39Jordi Hays?

  I need a CRM company.

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you're building, you need to get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. You need to go to profound.

• 1:35:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go to profound. Should we go through the Wall Street Journal article? We were featured in the Wall Street Journal. If you're just tuning in, Dylan Abriscado says on X, I'm joining TVP as president. John, Jordy and team have built something incredibly special. And after starting my career at CNBC, this feels full circle.

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Dylan also ran partnerships for HQ Trivia during their heyday.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Which is a crazy, crazy journey. He'll have to jump on the show sometime to talk about. Dylan also knows about sports, which is huge.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, this is a major unlock for us. We're gonna learn so much about sports.

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  We now have expertise on sports.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  He's also very into collectibles, so he's gonna be helping us build out the museum.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  We should sit down with him and ask him, like, what are all the sports? Like, what, how do they work?

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  What are the sports?

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Like, what are the sports that are popular?

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  What are the leagues?

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Yep, what are the leagues?

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  What are the plays?

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, the plays would be interesting. I would love for him to name every play, get up to speed on the plays. That would be very cool.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that we have to go through this. Maybe we can just, maybe we can pull out some of the key, some of the key quotes.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. What else is here? They call this podcast, but they didn't put us in quotes, at least not in this version.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  Total, total victory.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Big, big shout out to the...

• 1:37:08Jordi Hays?

  Total victory.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  To the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:37:11Jordi Hays?

  I, I wanted to highlight one quote in here. Let me find it.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  I, this, this was my favorite part.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:22Jordi Hays?

  And I hope that, that doesn't sound as important.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Who, who, who said, who said this quote that's your favorite quote?

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a quote that I have said when talking with Katie, the journalist over. I said, well, we said, this is Katie's reporting. She said, "The duo has a laundry list of moves they have zero interest in making. Forming a content studio, creating a network of shows, pivoting to political coverage, raising capital, setting up a venture fund, and selling." And I said, "We're perfectly fine with there being somewhat of a ceiling on the size of the business," Hayes said. "We're not building for an exit. We want to retire on the mics, on the air."

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  So, I told Katie that, you know, some, at some point decades into the future, there will be, there will be a final show. I hope, I hope it is many decades from now, but we hope to retire here on the mics. I hope to see John, John Exley's name in the chat for one final salute, but...

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, absolutely love the journal and fun to be in there for the first time.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 1:38:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you see Mike Tyson drop Mr. Beast?

• 1:38:31John Coogan?

  I did. I just dropped in the timeline. Mike Isaac said Tyson nearly Houdini'd Mr. Beast on camera. Are you familiar with this story?

• 1:38:39Jordi Hays?

  Didn't Houdini, didn't he Houdini himself?

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  I don't actually know.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  What is being Houdini?

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Tyler, what happened with Houdini?

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  I, I mean, this is like from when I was in like fourth grade, but I was told that basically he got punched in the stomach just like this. When he like, he didn't like clench or anything.

• 1:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  He was prepared for it.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  So he had a, I remember now. So he had a whole bit of letting any, any guy could just punch him.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  And if you, if you flex in the right way, pretty much.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  You can take a punch.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  You can take a punch.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:04Jordi Hays?

  But a guy, I guess, caught him when he wasn't like ready for it and just took a punch.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  Broke a rib or something, internal bleeding and Houdini passed away. R I P to a real one.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this video up.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Let's play the video of Mike Tyson.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  I'm gonna take a punch for Mike Tyson. Whenever you're ready. Oh.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Is that a straight to the liver?

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Oh, that is intense.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Whenever you're ready. Oh.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  He really can't.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  Whenever you're ready. Oh.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. That's enough. That's enough of that.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Was that, do you think, do you think he was doing a bit of acting there because there was such a viral moment?

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Was it like a liver? I don't think that was a liver shot. It felt more like rib.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  There's like a longer version I saw and he's like still down there for like another 10 seconds.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know. That's just, that's just.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, but is he just acting?

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  He's an entertainer.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  He's an entertainer. I think he knows, I think he knows to entertain, but at the same time, I think he knows that it is like, he can talk to Tyson and say, hit me hard, but don't actually take me out entirely. And Tyson can dial it into a point where Tyson knows, yeah, I'm not going to break your rib, but I will knock the wind out of you.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  The thing, seeing the, um, the Tyson Jake Paul fight.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Is watching Tyson all these years later with just like this incredible form and like movement despite being like long retired was.

• 1:40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was cool. It was cool to see. It was literally like riding a bike for him. Um, I pulled up, uh, we were talking about tickers earlier. People that wanted to, to invest in CRM could buy hashtag CRM or you could buy C3 by buying AI.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  On public.com, investing for those that take it seriously.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  Cause they have multi-asset investing, industry leading yields.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice. Trusted by Billions soon.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, but I pulled up some tickers here and I wanted to, I wanted to help you build a portfolio.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Oh, you have, you have more funny tickers. Okay.

• 1:40:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, start, we can do, uh, ticker cake.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Cake.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  For the Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  No way. That's good. Okay.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Hard not to go along. Taco.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Taco.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was Del Taco. It used to trade, trade under that before they got acquired.

• 1:41:11John Coogan?

  What else you got?

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Bud, Anheuser Busch.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Boston Beer Company traded under Sam.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  I'm still, yeah, I mean, yeah, that makes sense, but I would expect the ticker being beer. Like, I want the ticker to be generic, you know? For, for, for Budweiser, I would expect the ticker just to be beer. I would expect a ticker.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  I got it.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  I got it. It needs to be generic. It's totally generic.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I gotta, uh, okay, next up, Hog, guess.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Must be a bacon company, makes bacon.

• 1:41:45Jordi Hays?

  Close. Harley Davidson.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Uh, that's still, it's still.

• 1:41:48Jordi Hays?

  That's good. That's good. You wanna, you wanna invest in Hog?

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  That is a very funny ticker. I like that.

• 1:41:52Jordi Hays?

  You wanna, if you wanna have broad exposure to Hogs?

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yes. No, no, no. It doesn't, it doesn't actually give you exposure to Hogs. What else? Anything else?

• 1:42:02Jordi Hays?

  There's.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  There's a few.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  There's, uh, C R Z Y, Crazy Woman Creek.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  C R Z Y? What is that?

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  That's a tiny bank, uh, in Wyoming, O T C.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Somebody made a cannabis ETF called Yolo. I wonder how that's doing.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Probably not great.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there does seem to be some alpha in, in having a, a unique ticker, like a unique dot com.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Yolo is down eighty-seven percent all time.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Hopefully you didn't actually Yolo into Yolo. Be careful.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  Just absolutely brutal.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  If it looks like.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  You only lose, you only live once.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  You only lose once.

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Go down eighty-seven percent.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  You only lose everything once.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  You're only gonna be able to, if, if you don't lose everything once, you're, you're never gonna be able to make it all back.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  In one trade.

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  Hey, maybe, maybe the thesis for Yolo was this is a generational opportunity to go short. You could be up 80% if you went short.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  With size, what you got to.

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, guess, so I have one play.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Play?

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dave and Buster's.

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  Okay, that's pretty good. Yeah, long playing. It's not as much of a pure play as AI or CRM.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  There's also a love, which is LoveSack, the beanbag furniture retailer.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  Hmm, it's a rival to Moon Pods, don't like it.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't like it.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  Boo. Boo.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Uh, good luck to everyone over there. Uh, anyway, there was an incredible exchange between Secretary Wright and Jason Calacanis about solar and Elon Musk at the All In Summit. Uh, so Elon has it complete wrong. Yeah, I have the video pulled up. Uh, let's play this.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Let's play the.

• 1:43:50Speaker 07

  He, he has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. Um, and I'd love, if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll, I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10% of global energy. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  So this is the, uh, US Secretary of Energy, uh, ve- very clearly like long nuclear relative to solar. Um, and, uh, it's, it's a hot debate. I, I still feel like nuclear is, uh, is growing and there's so much, uh, like, how many startups have we talked to in, in the atomic world? Uh, there's something there. Elon, he, he seems to be a purist about solar and purist about, um, you know, not using LiDAR on, on the self-driving cars. And Elon likes the purely elegant solutions of just like the most efficient thing. But, uh, if the, if, if, if energy capacity is like messy and you need it at night, like there's only so much that you can do. What do you think?

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just want more energy. Just give me more.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  I think that's what.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  As much as possible.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  I think that's what Secretary Chris Wright is saying.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  It is interesting. Doug Doug from Radiant worked with Elon on a plan to power Mars and ran all the numbers on what it would take to generate enough power to create fuel out of the ice on Mars to bring a rocket back and concluded that nuclear was the best option, left SpaceX, started a nuclear company, and Elon somehow was unconvinced and went and is still super long solar. What's also interesting is that for all of his Elon, for as much of a solar bull as Elon is, he doesn't seem that indexed to the trend, right? Like, he owns SolarCity, but he's not, he doesn't have like a mega production.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  He feels longer energy storage than he is.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, solar.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly makes a ton of batteries, makes a ton of cars and stuff, but it makes sense that, you know, solar is important to, as a story of that. But, I mean, if you charge your Tesla in 10 years off of a nuclear power plant, like, he's still a winner.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  So it's not like he's he's bet his entire career or his entire.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I don't remember any, I'm sure he's spoken about nuclear, but

• 1:46:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I never remember Elon saying that he was anti-nuclear.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he's just, just, he's, he's, he's been amplifying a bunch of posts that have been basically from like solar maxis. But, anyway, if you're planning your build out of a nuclear power plant, do it on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Internal tech emails has some Larry Ellison data information from 2002, March 22nd. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our, with our users every day. Larry Ellison. Says, "Our top priority is to get Oracle users delighted with the quality and function of our CRM products. Until that happens, I doubt we will achieve success in the market. The biggest problem is missing features as opposed to showstopper bugs. There are

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  a few of those as well, but they are much easier to fix. Every applications meeting now centers around representatives from our user community who report back on application quality and set priorities for development. We cannot remain in denial if we talk with our users every day. We need to work very hard to achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction for our sales and marketing products as soon as possible. We have, we will have major improvements by June, but we are unlikely to deliver all we need until September. Doing it by September will require unrelenting focus and a Herculean effort. It will be done, but not unless we change our development and testing process and do a better job of listening to our user community. Larry." Pretty, pretty interesting that they were taking such a run at CRM. I feel like Oracle

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  is not particularly known for that.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how, what their, their revenue for the CRM product is today, but they bundle it into cloud applications revenue, which is

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, huge.

• 1:48:01Jordi Hays?

  Which still significant, you know, 3.8, 3.8 billion a quarter. They're already reporting their first quarter fiscal year 2026.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  I just hope we get Larry taking some shots at Marc Benioff and some, putting the timeline in turmoil. That'd be fun. Anyway, did you see this? Did you see this app, Poké? Did you see this?

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get, we should actually get the team on.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was texting with the founder. We should definitely bring him on. But Austin Allred interacted with their chat. It looks like he had, he'd signed up, given their phone number and wound up texting with their AI support rep or their AI sales rep. And Austin Allred just says WTF is going on? And so Poké identified that Austin is the founder of Bloomtech and says, "What brings you to my digital doorsteps? Trying to see how the real AI companies do it?" And it's like this super sassy, fine tune of an LLM. And Austin says, "Yeah." And the Poké's bot says, quotes, "Yeah, that's all the effort you're gonna put in? I expected more from someone who tweets about AI productivity

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  all day. Maybe you should enroll in one of your own courses on how to convince AI bouncers to let you in." And Austin just says, too much sass from AI. Sass is literally what I'm here for, Austin. But fine, let me be more direct. Why should you get Poké access when you're already busy running Bloomtech, managing angel investments, tweeting about AI productivity?

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  But here's the thing. Access to Poké isn't just about follower count. We're looking for people who will actually use it, provide feedback and help us improve. Your work training devs to leverage AI is interesting. Tell me more about what you'd actually do with Poké if I let you in. And yes, tweeting about it would have, would help your case. I think that's me, depending on how good you are. Depending on how good you are. And so he has this like sassy exchange.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  This is, I don't know if this is intentional, but, but letting, making the screenshots of the product marketing for the user's business is pretty, pretty smart. If it was intentional, because he has an incentive to share this because it's saying,

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  It's so ridiculous.

• 1:50:15Jordi Hays?

  It's funny and it's also, look, you built an entire business around teaching devs to use AI effectively.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  Respect that.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Austin kind of closes out. Look, let's get one thing straight. I know you're an AI model. You're a bunch of linear algebra running on a machine. If you can give me productivity gains, then show me how. Otherwise I'll stop using you. I'm not here to impress you. You need to impress me. And so he has this interaction, but it wound up working, right? Like he posted about Poké. He got a bunch of views and likes on the post. It definitely drew our attention to it. So I guess mission accomplished. I still don't fully understand what Poké does. So maybe there's a little bit more to do there, but it is, it is somewhat impressive that during the onboarding flow, the system was able to identify who Austin Allred is. I mean, I guess he's enough of a public figure at this point that if you just hit any LLM

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  and asked, who is Austin Allred? It would give you the high level summary of, of he's an angel investor. He's the founder of Bloomtech and he tweets about AI productivity. And so maybe that's baked in, but if you could bring this level of personalization, I don't know that I agree with like the sassy tone necessarily, but if you could bring this level of personalization to interactions, maybe that's good. I don't know.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  I saw, I saw somebody, I saw somebody posting that, that Apple should acquire.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I mean, which is the interaction company of California.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's their.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  That's their sub-brand?

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  That's their parent, the parent company.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Wait, no, no, no, really?

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:41John Coogan?

  That's.

• 1:51:42Jordi Hays?

  And they've been that, they've been that way for a while. So remember, we gave a cutoff.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No more, but then, but then they were the last one through the gate, right before the cutoff. Oh, well. Um, yeah, I would be interested to hear from the founder, like what the, this is at least like a teaser for what the product does. Like clearly it's a, it's a friend.com sassy, fine tune on AI.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it's more so, so the difference between this and friend, friend is not trying to be functional at all, other than being a friend. And this is trying to be a, a functional kind of tool assistant type thing that, that can, um, that has more, is for friend code.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  I just mean that, that there is a world where you're a company and you want to bring an LLM into your, into your product. And if you're trying to bring in like any other tool off the technological shelf, whether it's, you know, a UI component, HTML5, the way a link looks, you will express your brand through CSS, right? Like you will, you will, you might have, everyone has a button on their website, but every button looks different. It's an expression of their brand, right?

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  And so if you're going to bring LLMs or chat interfaces to bear, it makes sense to actually try and bring your brand through in some way. And this is a more extreme brand than I think most people would go with. But there is something to the idea that even if you're just a large enterprise company, you might want your, your, your LLM voice to actually be an extension of your brand, whether that's just being slightly friendlier or slightly more corporate or slightly use more or less jargon. You might just not, you might not want to just show up with the default ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, whatever flavor of LLM that like people are know, people are used to interacting with, you might want something that's a little bit more.

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Something, something tells me that the OK team could help the Apple team figure out how to summarize messages without botching them 90% of the time.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  That's a good take, yeah. Um, anyway, interesting.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Four hundred episodes of the greatest podcast of all time in history. Future Hall of Famer Founder's Podcast. Come on, warm it up and give it a good hit.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  Great contact, John. Colossus had the write-up this morning. This week, David Senna has just released his 400th episode of Founders, a milestone that represents far more than a number. It's a testament to one of the most extraordinary learning projects in podcasting history. Over nine years, David has read and reread 400 biographies and autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, distilling their wisdom into a treasure trove of timeless business principles. From episodes one to episode 400, Founders has become the ultimate masterclass in entrepreneurial thinking. David doesn't just summarize books. I know what you're thinking. He excavates the core ideas that built empires, the mental

• 1:54:42Jordi Hays?

  models that created fortunes, and the philosophies that turned ordinary people into business legends.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  A little syntax is not in bad form.

• 1:54:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that...

• 1:55:00John Coogan?

  Maybe. Who knows?

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? It's well-written.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  It is funny how ChatGPT has just ruined that entire stylistical flourish, which was very, very useful for a long period of time. And now it's like, there was a big movement on X, you probably saw, where it was like, "Bring back the M-dash. Make M-dashes legal again." Because ChatGPT has so clearly stolen the M-dash from writing that you can't use one without getting accused of using it.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  The OpenAI team doesn't seem to be laying off.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  The M-dashes? You see more than ever?

• 1:55:34Jordi Hays?

  I think the same amount.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought that the "it's not this, it's that" using the M-dash, that was going to be like a stylistical flourish that was going to be left behind with 4-0, and that 5 would have a different flavor, a different structure.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  Over the weekend, I kept seeing accounts commenting that were clearly...

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Running software to basically like look at the original post.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  And write back a response automatically to it.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  These are people that just want to build bot accounts up, or maybe it's their own account and they just want to grow. And I, I kept wanting to just like break, you know, my phone and just slam it from the ground because it's so annoying to start reading something and then halfway through.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Realizes.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, this is very nicely written, nicely written piece.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  And a huge congratulations to David Senna.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  They say, uh, that is four hundred episodes down, a thousand to go. I would, I would put it more in, in the range of four hundred thousand episodes to go.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  That's about right.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, bet, you know, if you love David Senna as much as we do, the best thing you can do, uh, to make his job, his life and his job better is to become one of history's greatest entrepreneurs.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Go on a generational, get a book written about you.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Get multiple books written about you.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  Maybe die. That helps too.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Some, some, some of the founders featured are no longer with us.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and it will, and you'll give him content that he can immortalize.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  And, uh.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  No, he does cover a lot of entrepreneurs. He made three episodes about Larry Ellison.

• 1:57:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  In, in twenty, uh, in twenty twenty, he was on a serious run, went on a, a full Larry Ellison kick, read three books, wrote three epis, made, made three episodes.

• 1:57:17Jordi Hays?

  David's story, maybe we'll have to do someday, we will make the founders episode on David. We will just fully, we'll study for, for, for months, we'll just emulate his entire process.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and, uh, cause his story is act, is truly incredible, right?

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  It's also.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  He was toiling.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was toiling away.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  For years. Uh, nobody knew his name.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Jordi Hays?

  Um, when I, I, I discovered the show, I knew from like, I just knew from, from.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  20 minutes listening that he was special talent. And I don't know if I was, I think I was one of the first few.

• 1:58:03Jordi Hays?

  I had to be one of the first three sponsors or something like that. You knew this.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you did mention that.

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  And I said something that was totally, in hindsight, so offensive. I was like, would you consider like selling?

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  Ah, funny.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Because he didn't, he wasn't generating like, you know, a ton of ad revenue at the time. I was like, look, you could probably make more. And he was just like, no, he said very nicely, he was like, no, I'm not, not, not interested, but thank you for the offer. And knowing David now, he was thinking like, I would not sell Founders Podcast for a hundred billion dollars.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  It is funny how, how Senna's impact and his like, his cachet in Silicon Valley and business broadly is like massive. And he's never written about, like, if you were to actually try and do a founder's episode about David Senna, it would be very hard. Because he's not someone that people just like profile.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  He's never, he's never really done press.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Doesn't do a lot of press, doesn't try to do press and also gets left out of like articles because he just exists in this, in this like, in this completely insider space where he doesn't really break out all the time. He doesn't cause a lot of controversy, doesn't get canceled by random people. He's not out there like duking it out. And so I think the mainstream media just doesn't realize how big he is in the podcasting world. And so you have this, you have this weird dynamic where it would be extremely hard because you wouldn't just be like, oh yeah, just pull up like one of the many profiles on him. Like there are profiles about a lot of people. There aren't that many about him.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  I think by this time next year, people have.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  I think they'll pick up on it. Yeah.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Woken up and written the, the proper profile.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Numeralhq.com, Sales Tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  We're getting a little bit of an era's tour going on. Andrew Ross Sorkin is on a book tour. This is going to be, this is going to be close to era's tour level fervor.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  And revenue.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  It's going to be listamania level. I think people will be shaking, crying if you're big into financial journalism. Fantastic research, business histories, you're going to want to attend this. Andrew Ross Sorkin is on tour for his new book, 1929. It's a like minute by minute account of the Great Depression, how it happened.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Who is in the room at a very concrete level. I talked to him a little bit about it. It seems like a fantastic book. I'm very excited for this.

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  He's been working on it for years.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yes, and and just a completely different take on the story that you've heard many times about. You've heard it at an abstract level of like there there was there was a financial bubble. The the the the person who was shining the shoes was was giving stock tips and there were all these different accounts and you've heard them at a very at a very high level about the the nineteen twenty nine bubble. But I don't think the story's ever been told at this level of detail. So very excited for this, obviously. It's it's one for the for the finance heads more than the the.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  I just think anybody that's.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  I think this will be exciting.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Period will be.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  And if you are in any of these cities on these dates, I highly recommend going and checking it out and and joining Andrew Ross Sorkin for a tour of nineteen twenty nine, his latest book.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Matt Palmer hit the timeline last week and said, there is insane demand for people who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way. Zephy went viral by saying sales. It's called sales.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Kind of kind of a.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Kind of kind of a.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Do you think Matt was getting at that? Like, what was Matt? Because Matt is is.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  I think Gabby Goldberg was also saying this is another word for comms.

• 2:01:38John Coogan?

  Comms, okay.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, comms in its in its purest form is not about just connecting you to.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Like, media and managing those relationships. It's about, like, figuring out how to position your position your product and generate attention in your market and drive revenue and all these other things.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  You know, listamania is a real phenomenon during when Franz Liszt would play, people would shake and cry and be so excited and faint is a popular thing. Tyler, are you familiar with listamania? Oh. You gotta get it. You gotta get up to date on Franz List. It's great, great music. 2.6 million in the chat asks, when will TBN go on tour? That's a great question. We have a lot more to build here in the studio, a lot more to do with the show as it is, but live events would be fun. We want to put our own twist on them, of course. So we will be figuring that out in the future. Until then, we will be telling you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks,

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You've seen their billboards all around Silicon Valley. Go check them out. Trung Fan shares, the r slash iPod subreddit is full of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids recommending which MP3 player to buy and bring to school after majority of US states have banned smartphones from the classrooms. Oh, that's interesting. People are reselling old iPods for $500 plus on eBay. Old is new. This is interesting. We had a viral

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  Instagram short talking about the fact that the iPod might be coming, the older iPod might be coming off of patent. And so there might be an opportunity to create a new version of it.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Like the play, if you just wanted to generate return, clearly a play would have been to go back and just buy, if you could go back in time, just buy, buy Apple products.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Hold.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Hold them, don't box them, etc. The question is, are people going to attach incredible value to the iPhone 15?

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  The 16, the 17, are there going to be specific generations?

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  I think the original iPhone trades above its value, but I don't think the iPhone 6 does, for example, even.

• 2:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  That most of them lose value. And even something like the original iPhone, I don't think it's outperformed the stock market. So it's, it's very much like the collectible car market where even if you're in, unless you're in the absolutely best performing car, even if you're in a car that like held its value and went up in value. Like I believe the Carrera GT has not outperformed the stock market, even though it's maybe doubled or tripled in value. It's, it's, you know, mid 1.5 million dollar car.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you can buy a brand, you can buy a brand new iPhone 6, 16 gigabytes, silver, unlocked.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  How much?

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, actually, okay, this is interesting. So, so the first result is just new, but you can tell the box is open. Second one is the iPhone six, factory sealed, unopened, investment grade, going for 5,000.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  5,000? But is it, is it gonna sell, I wonder? But 5,000, that's a lot for an iPhone six, you said?

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Okay, that's a good return, actually. That was a $500 product at the time.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but there, here's another one selling for, that's sealed for 88 dollars.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I think the market might be.

• 2:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Which one am I gonna buy? I mean, yeah, probably.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Great. Well, is one of them signed by Tim Cook or Steve Jobs?

• 2:05:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, a signed iPhone.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Signed iPhone, maybe, anyway. Anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez has an interesting anecdote here. Hyperliquid is generating more than 1.2 billion dollars in net income, surpassing NASDAQ's 2024 net income of 1.13 billion. Remarkably, it achieves this with a workforce 832 times smaller, while directing 98% of revenue to hype token buybacks. And Antonio says, funny that the proverbial four-person unicorn was achieved faster in crypto than AI.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, and this has happened before. There was a, there's a Y Combinator company called like X.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  I remember you, yeah, you were talking about this. Were they a unicorn?

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Came out of a batch that we covered. I don't know if they've been valued as a unicorn, but they were doing like hundreds of millions of revenue.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think comparing Hyperliquid, which is like, is a, is more of like an exchange product to an actual stock exchange, is like that, is that?

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  I mean, it's not the craziest comparison.

• 2:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's still, it still sounds crazy to be like, you know, tiny company.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Generating.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. It is remarkable. I mean, you could go further. Bitcoin, it's a trillion-dollar asset. It's a one-person unicorn, right? Or maybe a couple contributors, but mostly, you know, extremely tiny, extremely high revenue per employee. But, yeah, wild. I still think we will probably see the, the four-person unicorn in AI eventually, but we'll need to keep tracking it.

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up this video in the timeline tab?

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  And while we do that, let me tell you about Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  They need a, they need a stock ticker CRM two CRM AI that could be AI CRM.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Five letter stock ticker.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  I don't think you can do five letter stock ticker yet.

• 2:07:15Jordi Hays?

  We, we, we've got some people. Nicey.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  That would be a whole, it's like when the new like dot AI domains came out or dot XYZ domains came out. There's like this flourishing of, of new domains that flood the market. Uh, if, if one of the exchanges went to five letter tickers, that could be, that could be bullish. Anyway, uh, you wanted to pull up a video. What do you got for us?

• 2:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Rune has a post here highlighting this new humanoid demo.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play it.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  I, I don't.

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  We can't see it.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Here we go. Whoa, that is crazy.

• 2:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Has some feature that gets it to.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  It just pops right back up. That's remarkable. Wow. That slow mo is really insane.

• 2:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Gets kicked over, trips, pops up.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  That's so fast. That's so fast.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think a use case for humanoids that, uh, that people aren't talking. People always talk about humanoids. Oh, they're going to fold, fold your laundry.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Do your dishes. I just want to be able to.

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  Box one.

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Huge market for shadow boxing right now.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Under, under monetized. Imagine when you can just kind of be, you know, throwing, you know.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Haymakers. I mean, you can go as hard as you want, I guess.

• 2:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Go as hard as you want. You can train the robot, robot to, to, all right, you can punch back, but just like, don't, don't, don't take my head off kind of thing.

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  That is wild.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully there's no bugs.

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  That is, that is a wild video. We keep getting those. Do we know, uh, uh, what company produced that? Is that Unitree?

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  I think this is pretty cool. Let them, let them go public in the US.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Kidding.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  And then in five years, we're like, we have seven delays in the divestiture. There's going to be, there's concepts of a plan to get Unitree to divest in the United States, who knows. Anyway, speaking of tech in Washington, Will Monitis has a little thread for us. "The cultures of tech in Washington are fundamentally incompatible," says Will Monitis. "In tech, the foundation of a good career, the foundations are reckless sharing of favors, expecting nothing in return, endorsing young ideas and people and public networks of influence. In Washington, any of these will end you," says Will. "In the fullness of time, tech will end up having dramatically less influence on American politics than

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  finance or any other industry that was once a similar size. We are used to infinite positive sum games. Tech came in like a conquering army and we will be run out by the midterms. It will be a record year for lobbying firm profits, certainly a record year for state house lobbyists, as tech learns their ABCs of government, and you should expect a lot of consolidation in retirements in this space." I love that. "But the number of bills will be at an all-time low. This too will fade. If I had to make a trade, I would be willing to bet that we will have two vice presidents that spent some of their career as venture capitalists before we have a tech-native lobbying firm with over $10 million in durable bookings."

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  And Take Kim says, "I think that this is generally true for small to medium-sized startups growing rapidly, but as companies grow larger, the bureaucracy empire-building, power warfare, gaming of metrics, and internal politics creep in, tech is not immune." So, interesting to see where tech is going in Washington. Will was on a tear talking about-

• 2:10:36Jordi Hays?

  What's your major takeaway from this?

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  I think Will's really, like, breakaway take this weekend was that, oh, this is an older post from August 3rd. I don't know how this resurfaced, but I think it was because Will was saying that the tech industry needs to focus away from the sci-fi stuff, the Lukas. Like, tech, kind of, and AI, the technology, AI, the foundation model labs, it does feel like they let Lukas- Udkowski set the agenda for what was discussed. It was like all paper clipping debunks and fast take offs. And Will's discussion of this has centered around this idea that

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  the discussion needs to, if you are engaging in American politics, if you are engaging in Main Street politics, people that actually vote in elections, you have to put it in terms that are relevant to them, which means what will the impact of AI be on your job, on your community? Will it be positive? Will it be negative? There's, there's a lot of work being done right now on like what AI means for Main Street, for the average American, and it's definitely an open question.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  They're like, the, the, the, the models are at a level that can displace labor for sure. And the impact of that can be positive if it's handled appropriately. It could be very negative if it was handled inappropriately. And so I think that's, that's where I, I think the sci fi concerns have landed on deaf ears broadly in America. And they've been written off just as like, yeah, like, of course, I'll put that in the bucket of, of maybe there's unlimited fusion energy and we'll be on Mars and we'll be have faster than light travel and we'll have AI super intelligence and all that sci fi stuff's cool. Keep it in Hollywood, folks, like, talk to me about like, can I get a job tomorrow?

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  And for a lot of technology, there's been a debate about like, what has the effect on the labor market been? Unemployment in America is still really low. But are the jobs as satisfying as they used to be? Did people prefer being subsistence farmers or are they cool with only 3% of the population doing farming? Like, I think that that's a net gain. I think people are happy with that. People, I think people actually do like their email jobs more than being on the farm. But, you know, I don't know, some people, you know, it's not, it's not that crazy to say like, yeah, it was actually really rewarding to just be a hunter in a cave and go out and hunt a gazelle.

• 2:13:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at the, look at the trad movement, right?

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  People want to return to

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Return.

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Just going out.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  This was the, this is a

• 2:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Eating off the land?

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a transposition of the, uh, of the, the, the Unabomber take that, uh, that the, the power process of, of, of having the work that you do directly relate to how you survive. So if you go out and you hunt the gazelle and you bring back the gazelle and you eat that provides for survival and the further you get away from that, once the point that you're doing an email job to buy food at the grocery store, that is an abstraction that, that makes it harder to satisfy the, the fundamental, uh, power process that every, that is innate in every human. And so, uh, AI could, could wind up benefiting everyone, but making everyone's job more abstract.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Because it's like, I don't even, I don't even paint the painting anymore. I just prompt it and even if I'm making the same amount of money.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Did you see two people now, like if you wanted, like the models are actually better at prompt engineering than human?

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  I saw this, yeah.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  That used to be like, oh, don't worry, you're gonna be a prompt engineer, you're gonna be fine.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  It's like, oh, actually just saying, asking the model, what's the best way to prompt if I want the model, if I want this kind of output?

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done that a lot. I actually go to chat GPT and say, uh, uh, build me a VO3 prompt that will describe this particular scene and, and flesh it all out with the level of detail that will get me consistent video output. But there's still obviously a ton of value in creativity and coming up with interesting ideas. There's still a ton of value all over the place that hasn't been eroded. And at the same time, you know, one day we'll be saying, okay, well, the models are plateauing and the enterprise adoption isn't that high and labor productivity isn't spiking. So like the actual rollout, like we're looking at like, what, $4 billion in Anthropic, $12 billion at, at OpenAI, like there isn't that much value that's being generated.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  China's AI action plan is we're going to integrate AI into manufacturing workplace. We're going to drive productivity and efficiency across the enterprise.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Soham. Not Soham Perik.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  Different Soham.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  BTW says, "My Twitter account has more MRR than most YC startups."

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  And I think that is entirely untrue in itself.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  It's true in two ways, or it's untrue in two ways. There are two flaws.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  There are, yeah, there are two flaws.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  The, the, the average MRR at YC startups is certainly higher than, than the ex creator payouts. Like, the ex creator payouts are, are usually, I would be shocked if it was over a few thousand dollars for Soham. He's kind of just taking a shot at YC startups for having like low MRRs. But when we talk to these companies, the MRRs are usually in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so this guy created an open source version of Clouly. And called Cheating Daddy. A free and open, open source app that lets you gain an unfair advantage.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  What you were looking for, what everyone wanted. Well, Casey Flint put Soham in the truth zone, said, "One day, people will learn what the middle R in MRR and ARR stands for." Not today, though. Tyler, do you know what the middle R in MRR stands for?

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it recurring?

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  It is recurring.

• 2:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Why do you, why did you have to take so long? Did you think it was Millie and the reply says R for random, monthly random revenue? Yeah, we had better revenue here, better revenue there. We counted, you know, this revenue that was over these four months in this month. No.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was someone.

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  No, that, that, that, some people say, "I am at a hundred million ARR." And you can say, that can be also seen as annualized run rate.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  Yes, ARR.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat disingenuous if you're trying to market it as like contracted.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Recurring revenue.

• 2:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Contracted.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Yes. But I mean, to be fair, like, there is a wild, there is a wild, like, gap between the quality of ARR. Like, there are some, there are some companies that have contracts that are so ironclad, they would bankrupt the customer to try and get out of them. Like, it is, it is written in stone that you're paying that bill every month for the next five years.

• 2:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elon went to war with a bunch of SaaS providers during the Twitter, when he got in there at Twitter, and he was like, wait, we're spending how much?

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  How much on this, how much on that?

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  And just said, yeah, I'm not paying.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  And he probably was able to pull out of a lot of those that were booked as ARR, as, as true annual recurring revenue.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Um, at the same time, there are plenty of-

• 2:18:06Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but again, it's like, if, if there's a, there's a degree, even if something is contracted-

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  If they have to sue Elon-

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  -in order to get the money back, it's like, or, or get what they're owed, it's like, at a certain point, they'll spend more on the lawsuit than-

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  -than the actual value, and, and Elon probably-

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  -ran, uh, ran the number.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yes. Don't misstate your MRR. Don't misstate your ARR. Um, just be honest and tell your investors and folks what's really going on with your business.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  How'd you sleep last night?

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  I slept fantastic.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Me too. Me too.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  That must be why we're feeling so good. I only got an 86, but I got, uh-

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  So, I got, I, I, I spent not the full night in the, in the 8 Sleep, uh, so I got a 76. It says I only slept six hours, but I got another three in the kid's bed before. So, I got like nine hours. I'm feeling fantastic. Um, I need to get an 8 Sleep in his room so I can like merge all the data together, give it the real, the real picture. Anyway, you can go get an 8 Sleep at 8sleep.com, get a POD 5, five-year warranty, 30 net risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping, uh, net cap girl.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  We must-

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  Throwback post.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  So it's from 2022.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:21Jordi Hays?

  And absolutely all-

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  This is what started it all.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  We must return to an era of naming companies like American Computing Corporation or US Semiconductor. The days of cute and silly startup names are over. No longer is it sufficient to just drop a vowel from a word and call it a day. We must build serious companies with serious names.

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  And, and again, this was, this was the, the, the browser company of New York already existed.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:47Jordi Hays?

  They had kind of done that.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  It was the start of the trend.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  It was the start of the trend.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  But then we got the Amco. But then we got Amco.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  American Manufacturing Company of America. No, Advanced Manufacturing. He doesn't have two Americas. That would be the real, the real, the real final boss. The, the, the, the New York browsing company of New York.

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  The American browsing company of America. Um, people have been having a lot of fun with this.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  This meta, this meta, I think.

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  The meta's over.

• 2:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Should be, no, the American Computing Corporation or US Semiconductor. I, I, I still think this is wide open.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  No, I think it's, I, I think it's over. I think going forward.

• 2:20:21Jordi Hays?

  I want, I, the thing that I want is.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  It's Coogan and Sons.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last names.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Coogan and Sons.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  And Chris Amidon did this.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he did.

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  He did this. But it, but it's an evergreen meta.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Because no one can say, oh, you named the company.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  You can take it further. Amidon sounds like the name of a startup a little bit. It kind of works. It's not Amidon and Sons. It's not Amidon and Amidon. That's what I want. I want someone to come in with the, with the Cosgrove and Co- Cosgrove, Cosgrove and Cosgrove LLC. And build, build AI ERP's a solution or something. Business process outsourcing, something like that. Uh, anyway. Uh, whatever your startup name is, throw it on a billboard. Get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of my advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the world.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna let you run the, run through these legendary Hacker News comments.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  So Hacker News is legendary. Tyler, are you, are you a Hacker News user?

• 2:21:22Speaker 02

  Uh, occasionally I'll go on, but I, I never go into the comments anymore.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've only, I've only gotten one really solid post on Hacker News. I think I have like 154 karma. Um, but, uh, I mean, when, when I was your age, Hacker News was like the place. Like it was, it was the spot. Like every single day, opening up, reading threads. That was where news broke, where the discussion happened.

• 2:21:45Speaker 02

  I used to go on there a fair amount. I think I've kind of replaced it with, um, Marginal Revolution.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:21:50Speaker 02

  Tyler posts like whatever, five or six links every day.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:53Speaker 02

  Generally pretty.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Are you in the comments section?

• 2:21:55Speaker 02

  Even those I don't, I don't read.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  You don't comment? You're just a lurker?

• 2:21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, Hacker News is legendary for not enough lurking. These people really have some all-time bad takes. These are legendary Hacker News comments that age like milk. So, the first one. Dropbox, one of the greatest YC companies to come out of the early batches, posted, this is from Drew Houston, the founder. He posts on Hacker News, "My YC application, Dropbox, throw away your USB drive." Of course Dropbox is the way to sync and share files on the internet. And Brandon M. chimes in in 2007, right when the company was getting started.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  "I have a few qualms with this app. One, for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself, quite trivially, by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curl FTP FS, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted file system from Windows or Mac. This FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." Why don't you just do that? Why don't you just build your own Dropbox? It's so obvious. And I love this because obviously the take was wildly incorrect. Dropbox became a multi-billion dollar company. But it's a beautiful bubble to live in where you assume that everyone is comfortable booting up Linux and building a Dropbox competitor on their own.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Maybe with vibe coding it's possible, but still, I think people are still using Dropbox. The company's actually been doing quite well and has not been really affected. Anyway, second Hacker News post that age like milk. "Bitcoin, peer-to-peer network based on anonymous digital currency." This is from 2009, and the top comment here says, "Well, this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there's absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency." That is a wild. Well, I think, I mean, it was reasonable at the time. It was a crazy idea and, uh, and, and it was, it was in, and the faith in the distributed system took years to build up.

• 2:24:01John Coogan?

  It was, it was seen as a, as a toy and then a joke and then a meme and then a bubble and then a crash and then another bubble, then a crash and then another bubble. But eventually it became, uh, accepted. Now people have lots of faith in Bitcoin. And even with all the turmoil that we've seen in the market and turmoil in, in international geopolitics, Bitcoin is now at a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars a coin. Uh, from what was probably, uh, a few cents when this post went live. What was the price of Bitcoin, May 8th, 2009? That is an interesting question. I imagine it was very low and now it has appreciated quite significantly.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Probably enough to buy a luxury watch on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Tyler, do you have the price of Bitcoin?

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  So, so.

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  Everywhere I go, it just says zero.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  Zero?

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  No, but here's, here's the story.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  So it didn't have a market value, uh, at the time. I, I'm, I'm sure.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  They were free.

• 2:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was basically.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  It was free.

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  The first recorded real world transaction for Bitcoin occurred, uh, over a year later on May 22, 2010.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  When a guy bought two pizzas.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  That was the pizza transaction?

• 2:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Two pizzas for 10,000 VCs.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Wow. I didn't realize it was that old. Uh, that, that is, that, that is crazy. Somebody was posting about this on Hacker News in 2009, a year before the pizza transaction. That is crazy. I, I mean, the pizza transaction is, is famous, famous. Uh, well, how many, how many Bitcoins was it?

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  It was like. 10,000.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  10,000 Bitcoins.

• 2:25:36Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if there'll be another for two pizzas. I wonder if there will ever be another trade.

• 2:25:41John Coogan?

  Like that?

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Where you could just pick up.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  They should make a whole documentary about that trade. Where that Bitcoin went, did the next person hold, did the next person hold? How the value accrued? Fantastic. Anyway, in 2020, in 2023, this is a more recent Hacker News comment that aged like milk. Michael Truel from Cursor now worth, I think, in the secondary market, trading almost north of 20 billion, certainly north of 10 billion.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Certainly north of 20.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  A massive company, used by probably millions of developers at this point. Posts on Hacker News, Cursor, a code editor built for programming with AI. And the top comment from YakAccount4 on March 24th, 2023. There's nothing on the official website or GitHub that indicates what this software is other than a cropped screenshot that looks like VS code with a prompt cover, with a prompt pop up over it. And I still can't figure out if this is some sarcastic joke software or something. Wow, aged like milk. Not great. And the final Y Combinator Hacker News comment that aged like milk.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Y Combinator's Airbed and Breakfast casts a wider net for housing rentals as Airbnb from TechCrunch in 2009. And a Hacker News commenter chimes in and says Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net. They're changing their entire business model. This is, this is what, two decades before OpenAI started using or ChatGPT started using this syntax? Oh, Airbnb isn't just casting a wider net. They're changing their entire business model because the original one is severely flawed. Renting a room or bed out of your home like a hotel most likely violates multiple tax and business laws

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  in just about every US city, let alone the severe liability that a guest slips in your shower or breaks their collarbone. I've worked at a resort hotel, cities have specific bed taxes, hotels have to be inspected. They have liability insurance, vacation rental owners pay taxes. Some cities don't even allow short-term rentals. Of course, none of that mattered. Airbnb figured it all out. They paid the taxes, they fought the local governments and created new legal structures to satisfy all parties involved. And now the business is worth tens of billions of dollars.

• 2:28:03Jordi Hays?

  They say, if I wasn't a VC, I wouldn't, if I was VC, I wouldn't touch this site.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  So it says, that's hilarious. Well, if you're looking to go up market and find a vacation home with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream events, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service, get on Wander and find your happy place. Good call, cutting to Tyler on that one. It's a vacation home but better. Hayden identified exactly the trend that you were feeling. This is who you're arguing online with, and it's just a picture of a neural network, of course, and 31,000 people enjoyed it. It really is, the bots are getting wild, wild, wild, wild. Well, I have some tips for those of you who are using X, the everything app. I recommend going into the notification filters,

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  and you can turn off notifications from accounts that don't have a verified phone number, don't follow you, you don't follow them, and after you do that, you will basically only see notifications in the notifications tab from people who you're mutuals with, people that you can evaluate their full account to see that it is in fact a real person, maybe someone you know in real life, maybe someone who has enough exhaust on the internet that you can, they've established themselves as an interesting poster who's clearly not just a bot, and then you will only see those folks in your replies. And then you can always see who's replying to your posts if you click on the actual post,

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  but for the most part, that has dramatically upgraded my experience. I don't get, I really don't get any notifications from just random accounts. I only see, I only see stuff from people I'm mutuals with, people who I actually care about, and it feels, the actual experience of being on X feels like being in a very small chat room. Even if I have a post that gets thousands of likes, I'm really only seeing, oh, Tyler liked it, oh, Jordy liked it, cool, I made them smile there, my friends. It creates a much tighter, you know, small hometown feel.

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  If I don't like one of your posts, it's got to be really bad.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Because if, what's the quote, if there's, if there's one person liking

• 2:30:11Jordi Hays?

  If there's one like, it's me.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  It's me. Fantastic. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, or second guest of the show, because we already had Bill Bishop on the show in the re-stream waiting room. We'll bring in Pete from SciQuantum. Pete, how are you doing?

• 2:30:26Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:30:26Speaker 08

  Hey guys, how are you doing?

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Doing fantastic. How are you? I hear you have some big news.

• 2:30:30Speaker 08

  Pretty good.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. What's new? Introduce yourself and the company, please.

• 2:30:34Speaker 08

  Oh yeah. Thanks, thanks a lot for having us. I'm not really, appreciate it. I'm Pete. I'm a co-founder of SciQuantum. We are a quantum computing company based in the Bay Area. And yeah, I moved here 10 years ago to build a quantum computer and thought I'd be on the boat back six months later. And we're still here and we're really just like humbled to be now announcing a billion dollar fundraiser for us to go ahead and actually build giant quantum computers.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:31:09John Coogan?

  It's massive. $1 billion. Um.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, give us, give us the 10 years in two minutes.

• 2:31:19Speaker 08

  Well, I'll give you the, the, um, prior to 10 years, that 10 years, myself and my co-founders spent about a decade in the university system doing what people think of when they think of quantum computing, which is science experiments in a research lab with single photons and chips and so on and so on, published a ton of papers and then got fed up with that. And, uh, uh, some of my colleagues made a bunch of breakthroughs in the architecture for optical quantum computing. And so we sort of developed a conviction that we could actually build a million qubit system. You know, Google and IBM and others are all in hot pursuit of useful quantum computing. Everyone today can make systems of tens or

• 2:32:02Speaker 08

  hundreds of qubits, uh, but you need about a million qubits. You need a huge system. And so we sort of. Uh convinced ourselves that we could actually build that quickly through leverage of the semiconductor industry and we moved to Silicon Valley uh basically to build the organization that would do that. Uh that meant taking weird devices like single photon sources and single photon detectors uh that you know you can't find in a regular manufacturing process and putting them into a commercial fab. So we spent north of a hundred million dollars and many, many years putting superconductors and single photon devices into uh Global Foundries

• 2:32:43Speaker 08

  Fab Eight, which is a very big, very mature, commercial semiconductor foundry in upstate New York, last remaining bastion of pure play semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:53Speaker 08

  And um so yeah, like big emphasis on semiconductors basically for many years. We were doing other stuff as well, quantum architecture and algorithms and systems and so on, but really spending money on semiconductors. Now we have these wafers, we can make like high volume uh we can manufacture in pretty high volume the devices that we need. And so our emphasis is sort of switching towards building data center like machines. And so last year, we announced about a billion dollar Australian deal with the Australian government for us to build our first system just outside Brisbane. A few months later, we announced that we'd be the anchor tenant of a new five hundred million dollar quantum computing campus on the south side of Chicago, former US steel site, used to make a million tons

• 2:33:38Speaker 08

  of steel a year. We are honored to be uh breaking ground there in a very, very short period of time. And uh yeah, just thrilled to be at this level of maturity and sort of readiness now to actually realize these systems.

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  How does the Australian government even assess something like this? I feel like the government is not known, I mean, at least the US government's not really known for having like tons of technical expertise internally. Uh famous examples of like the government struggling to build uh a crud app for, you know, registering your healthcare information. Uh it feels like the technical due diligence to understand how to underwrite that investment and then actually get any sort of value out of it. I mean, you have to rewrite systems uh to actually write something that's that's going to run on a quantum computer, correct? Like what was that? What was that deal like? What was that? Uh what is Australia optimistic about in having a billion dollar facility?

• 2:34:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, governments struggle terribly to build credit apps, but like the entire might of Silicon Valley also struggles to build a good to do list app. Like, there is still no good to do list as far as I'm concerned. I have a sort of provocative thesis that building to do lists is actually harder than building quantum computers. But that one will get me in trouble. But, you know, governments have excelled, obviously, in Manhattan projects and James Webb Space Telescope.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:04Speaker 08

  And, you know, Space Shuttle and you name it, like semiconductors, the internet.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:10Speaker 08

  And, and, and you can also look at companies like SpaceX and Tesla and TSMC and ASML. Like the pillars of our economy and our advanced society. Those companies wouldn't be the companies that they are today without literally billions of non-dilutive government support in every case.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:31Speaker 08

  And so I don't think it's unusual that a government supports this. I think governments increasingly understand that hard technology and this kind of frontier technology is sovereign and strategic. And dangerous if you don't pay attention to it. We see that very acutely with semiconductors and AI supercomputers.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:52Speaker 08

  And then you asked about the sort of diligence. So the chief scientist of Australia spent about eighteen months together with a pretty big team evaluating what we're doing. They came to our labs and held us by the scruff of the neck and made us reproduce measurements that we were claiming. There was a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed her emails early in that process. And her emails revealed that she was highly skeptical of us when she first met us. And the Australian press wrote about this in the frame of like, you know, chief scientist, highly skeptical of quantum claims. Which I'm like, what do you want her to be? Do you want to be to be like highly?

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  It's her job to be skeptical.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:35Speaker 08

  And, and, you know, we were just like super gratified by the end of that process that, um, uh, obviously after speaking to a lot of different, different outfits, they, they, uh, they chose us. And then in the US.

• 2:36:48Jordi Hays?

  So, so, sorry to, sorry to cut you off, but I, I, what is?

• 2:36:51Speaker 08

  No, you're good.

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  So, so the Australian government, you guys are partnering with them. What is, what is the value that they're hoping to get out of this, out of this project?

• 2:37:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I mean, I think like if you look at semiconductor fabs, if you look at the current effort to get TSMC into Arizona, if you look at some of the sort of horse trading that's going on around the location of AI supercomputers, I think nations now understand that it is strategically important where these systems are built. And, you know, when the US incentivizes TSMC to build in Arizona, the US government isn't buying chips from TSMC, you know, they're not owning the fabs, they're just making sure that that infrastructure is built on a piece of land that they care about. And to first order,

• 2:37:41Speaker 08

  the Australian thing is structured the same way. It's worth saying that Australia as a nation has been historically forward-thinking in investing in the academic foundations of quantum computing. So a lot of the basic research, two of my co-founders, a lot of the early work on optical quantum computing and error correction all came out of Australia. And so it's pretty poetic and touching actually that it's heading back to Australia where it all started.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  What's the, what are some of the use cases that you're excited about? People talk about like, oh, you'll be able to break Bitcoin, that'll be like disruptive or crypto or cryptography. But is there?

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Or quite profitable.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, who knows?

• 2:38:25Jordi Hays?

  If you guys do it.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  It's the same as like asteroid mining gold. If you get, if you bring a, you know, $10 trillion of gold to the, to America, what, what happens? But in the context of AI and supercomputing, like actually like delivering business value is, is there sort of like a near-term scenario where quantum computing can drop the cost of inference or unlock a different scale of training? Or, or will the, the architecture of what we are doing with AI fundamentally change once a million qubit quantum computer comes online?

• 2:39:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we're not going to replace CPUs, we're not going to replace AI supercomputers. Uh, and although there is sort of some papers that talk about quantum machine learning, that stuff is really early at the moment. If someone tells you they know how to do quantum machine learning today, you should be pretty skeptical.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:39:19Speaker 08

  What we're excited about is, you know, the way I think about this is that language models now, I visualize them as this sort of expanding frontier that's just like eating through everything we do with computers and by the way, everything we do in our lives and so on. Uh, there's a known limit to that, beyond which we don't expect conventional computers will go. And on the other side of that threshold is chemistry, material science, drug discovery, fuels, catalysts, fertilizers, semiconductors, like the microscopic foundations of our physical world, where conventional computers have a really, really hard time doing those simulations and where we don't have the training data in general

• 2:40:00Speaker 08

  to train AI models that will reach far into that urgent territory. And that's what we're really excited about with a quantum computer. A quantum computer calculates from first principles rather than making approximations from, from data.

• 2:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 2:40:15Speaker 08

  And through that kind of first principles calculation, we think we can reach much, much further into unexplored territory. The other thing that's maybe interesting is that at Cyqon, we make the highest performing photonics in the world against a whole bunch of figures of merit. And of course, photonics is increasingly being viewed as a potential solution to what is otherwise, uh, maybe a difficult situation in the scale up of AI supercomputers, where we run out of power, run out of space, uh, run out of money, et cetera.

• 2:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. What, what were, what were the key unlocks, uh, that allowed, uh, you guys to put together this billion dollar round? It's certainly the larger than most IPOs.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we, I mean, it's pretty surreal, to be clear, right? Like, this is the only job I've ever had. Uh, the only other real job I've had is working in a garden center stacking compost. So, yeah, to be clear, like, this isn't. This doesn't feel normal. It feels pretty crazy to me. Um, I'd put it also in context with other things that have happened in Silicon Valley where people have spent a way larger amount of money, uh, before they get to a product on, uh, things that are debatably more or less valuable than a quantum computer, you know? Um, uh, but the, um, the unlock, one of the biggest things that we did when we raised our series D with BlackRock and Tama Sec and others, um, Bailey Giffords.

• 2:41:42Speaker 08

  We told them that we were gonna unlock one of the hardest problems for us, which is a new material for optical switching. We had to build an enormous crazy machine here in the South Bay, biggest molecular beam epitaxie tool in the world. Uh, molten titanium inside, liquid helium inside. Huge risk for us, and without that, there's no way we're building an optical quantum computer. Uh, the shipping company dropped that into the Alameda Bay and broke it. So we had some trouble during COVID. Uh, but we got it done on time. We delivered. We got it built. And then the other thing that we've done is

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  Wait, is it still at the bottom of the ocean?

• 2:42:20Speaker 08

  No, no, no. It, it just like fell and cracked.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:24Speaker 08

  You know, we were, we were like late on the schedule.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Some scuba diving equipment, go down, get it.

• 2:42:29Speaker 08

  Not quite.

• 2:42:30Jordi Hays?

  John's, John's scuba certified.

• 2:42:31John Coogan?

  I, I, I like scuba diving and I like, I like treasure.

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Willing to help out.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:42:36Speaker 08

  I mean, there's gotta be some amazing stuff down there, like out on the, on the port at Alameda. There's gotta be some beautiful stuff. But then the other thing we did, you know, the chandelier?

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:45Speaker 08

  Like the golden chandelier that politicians love to take photographs with? We got rid of that.

• 2:42:51John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Uh, what?

• 2:42:53Speaker 08

  That's in the trash.

• 2:42:54John Coogan?

  What do the energy requirements look like over the next like decade if we assume that there's a million qubit quantum computer running? Are, are we gonna see a similar race for, uh, just like intense energy production that we're seeing in the AI supercomputer build out?

• 2:43:10Speaker 08

  No, it's like, it's like the same story, but told backwards is what you should expect with quantum computing. So like, yeah, AI and conventional data center. It's pretty helpful for us, given that we're talking about building big machines.

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:22Speaker 08

  Ten years ago in Silicon Valley, if you were talking about supercomputers or HPC or like building a big computer.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:30Speaker 08

  People would like fall asleep in the meeting and throw you out of their office, right? Uh, it's nice that we're now surrounded by people who are sort of brave about building big machines. But uh, we are going to build a big machine. And then the good thing is that the three months into building it, it's already going to be out of date. Right? Like we, we're at the beginning of that sort of densification, miniaturization, power efficiency journey. Whereas AI and conventional supercomputers, I think are coming to the end of a, you know, multi-decade journey of uh, more and more efficiency and so on. So it's actually pretty exciting that we should be able to further miniaturize and densify these systems over time.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. Uh, thank you for hopping on the stream. I learned a lot.

• 2:44:17Speaker 08

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  This is, yeah, this is such a complex uh, uh, industry, but uh, it, it's been really fun tracking all the progress.

• 2:44:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we've had any, any.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  This is the very first, this is the first.

• 2:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Quantum company on the show.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  I haven't put, I haven't thrown out a lot of invites because I'm so out of loop on it. Um, but thank you so much for taking us through it and actually explaining it in terms that uh, even I can understand.

• 2:44:39Speaker 08

  Really appreciate it. Thanks.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We'll bring them in and I will let you take the introduction.

• 2:44:54Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome to the show. It's uh, uh, please, please pronounce your name before I butcher it.

• 2:45:03Speaker 09

  Sadi Khan.

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Sadi, great to meet you. Great to meet you and welcome to the show. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:45:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm Sadi. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Avon. Avon is a home equity backed credit card company. We launched our home equity card about four or five years ago and it's been on a tier since then. In 15 minutes or less, you can save 50% or more on your monthly interest rate as a homeowner in America. We just announced our Series Z last week and we're excited to do the battle. Thank you.

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Series Z. Hard to get into those numbers across four years. What, uh, walk us through, I guess, yeah, I'd love to, I think it's, I think our audience will generally understand how if you have a credit card backed by your home equity, it'd be easier to be competitor, competitive from a rate standpoint, but break down the actual way that you, you make this work.

• 2:46:06Speaker 09

  Yeah. So as you know, there's about traditionally a home equity credit card, home equity in general takes about 30 days to originate and costs thousands of dollars. And as you know, a credit card takes a few minutes to get from Capital One or Bank of America, any great bank. And so we started with this mission of how do we make it as fast as a credit card to get a HELOC? And so we got it down to as fast as 15 minutes by machining down this process for maximal efficiency. And so whether it be like robot arms that do signatures to automatic income verification with the IRS, to everything in between, we're able to compress this thing down to 15 minutes. So it feels as convenient as, as a credit card, but you get the rates of a HELOC and the rewards and the convenience of a credit card.

• 2:46:48Speaker 09

  And so we offer 2% unlimited cash back on every single transaction that you do on, on, on a HELOC for the first time ever. And you get it in the form factor that you can go to Home Depot and spend a thousand dollars on lumber, or you could go to Whole Foods and spend $5 on a banana. And our customers have been able to do both.

• 2:47:07Jordi Hays?

  That's, uh, that's pretty incredible. What, um, I guess, what were kind of the key unlocks in the journey? Was there, how did you nav, like, how has like the interest rate environment, um, kind of impacted the business as well? I mean, uh, ultimately, there's always going to be a lot of home equity that's just locked up that people aren't able to leverage, uh, regardless of, of the rate environment, but I'm curious what, what trends you've seen.

• 2:47:35Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I think at a very high level, our goal is to build a product which has the lowest cost of capital for consumers after your primary mortgage. So regardless of the interest rate environment, if it's high or if it's low, that's something we don't control. Jeremy Powell controls that. So regardless of what the interest rate does, our goal is to come in and offer every single consumer the lowest possible, lowest cost of capital after your primary mortgage. And we've generally historically done that. Um, and when interest rates go up, there's generally two or three things that happen. And when interest rates go down, roughly the inverse of those two or three things happen. So I think we're all expecting interest rates, hopefully to come down a little bit for consumers over the next, like, few months on the next Fed meeting. And the three things

• 2:48:17Speaker 09

  that I think will happen are, A, we will expect more demand for capital, right? More people will use more credit, generally speaking, across not just our product, across all products. Um, we become actually more competitive in some ways because if you kind of think about it, the interest rates dropping, drops to a larger proportion. The drop affects a HELOC or a mortgage by a larger proportion than a traditional credit card, which is also a variable rate product.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:48:40Speaker 09

  And then finally, there is some kind of, you know, trace effects of how interest rates and mortgages kind of interact with one another, where due to the very low historical interest rates, people are sitting on extremely low mortgage rates, but because of the increase in interest rates, people are not able to refinance their mortgage and get a cash out, which they've done historically. And so they're tapping HELOCs to do home improvement projects, make their home better, because it's getting harder to move to a new home, and it's getting harder to do a cash out refinance.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Uh, you said something about robotic arms doing signatures. Anything more to that story? What?

• 2:49:16Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, I mean, I, I don't know if you guys, when you guys bought your home,

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:21Speaker 09

  in San Francisco or elsewhere, when you closed your mortgage deed of trust, you had to go to a notary or you had to go to a title closing station and you had to sign a stack of papers, the A-FIC. And we looked at that. And if you wanted to get this thing down to 15 minutes, there was just zero way we can do it by having a notary show up at your house or you going to a title company. So we went, well, how can we figure out a way to be able to do a remote wet signature? And so we invented this robot arm that literally you control from your phone and you could execute what is something called an original wet signature that is acceptable in every single county across the United States. So we can close this thing down in 15 minutes. We do some crazy shit.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Is that, did, did you guys ever get, uh, I don't know if many people, I'm sure.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Regulators hate this one weird trick.

• 2:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, it feels like potentially, it feels like potentially a workaround that, uh, how different is it for me to move a pen than it is to move an arm that, that signs a doc, right? Why do I need to be in the room? You know, why do I?

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  I love this. This is great.

• 2:50:23Speaker 09

  Probably, yeah, we spent months going through every single, I mean, people have tried this before, like trying to build like a, a robot arm to do wet signatures. There's a lot of detail in our patent that goes down to like the exact amount of memory buffer we have to keep on, you know, the device versus the wire versus your phone to ensure it is always an original signature and not just a remote signature.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, cause my, my thought was like, you could spin this out and it's probably like a billion dollar business by itself.

• 2:50:51Speaker 09

  We've been told that before.

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  You've been told that before. There we go.

• 2:50:54Speaker 09

  We've been told that before, but we're just very focused on making sure homeowners can get access to the lowest cost of capital today.

• 2:51:02Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Uh, well, congratulations on, on the funding, uh, milestone and, uh, yeah, I'm sure you guys are just getting started. John?

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  How much was it?

• 2:51:09Jordi Hays?

  A hundred and 10 million dollars.

• 2:51:13John Coogan?

  Congratulations. It's the week of the series E.

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 2:51:18John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 2:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Lots to see it.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Sadi.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:51:23Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:51:24Speaker 09

  Awesome.

• 2:51:24John Coogan?

  And our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have Lucas Singer again from Divergent.

• 2:51:31Jordi Hays?

  I wanted him to drive one of his supercars into the ultra.

• 2:51:36John Coogan?

  I know, I know. And, and, and I've heard, uh, unsubstantiated rumors that he might be down for that at some point. Couldn't make it happen today. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Lucas? Good to see you.

• 2:51:47Lukas Czinger?

  Great to see you. Doing great today.

• 2:51:48John Coogan?

  Kick us off. Did you raise a series what now?

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Series C?

• 2:51:53Lukas Czinger?

  Series E.

• 2:51:54John Coogan?

  Series E.

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:51:56Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  How much?

• 2:51:56Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah. Late-stage $290 million.

• 2:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:52:02John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  Triple. It's a hat-trick of Series E's today on the show. Congratulations.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  What does that unlock? What's the next phase of Divergent?

• 2:52:17Lukas Czinger?

  Accelerating this platform that we've built. So really taking this into scale manufacturing with a focus on defense work. As you might remember, we started in automotive.

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:27Lukas Czinger?

  We're a deep technology business. We've built this over a decade, but now it's really unlocking additional capacity, capacity to make the most meaningful, frankly, weapon systems primarily in the world and to supply those to our great prime customers and to the US government directly to add over 50,000 square feet to this campus in Los Angeles, but then also to fund the build-out of our future facilities across the US.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the footprint of that build-out across the US? We've heard that famous story about there's an F-35 part that's made in every single congressional district. Maybe it's coincidence. It does seem like it's important to have a balanced footprint across the US. What's the courtship process like? Is it based on tax incentives or local talent? How do you think about picking a new territory to expand to?

• 2:53:26Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, we think about where we can have the most impact for the nation. So where can we be closest to the customer that's making a product that we can truly be helpful with? And what is the greatest concentration of products and customers? Where is that in the US? And that's where we want to be. And internationally, we think along those same lines, but also strategically. If we're going to be near theater, where does it really make sense to have a facility? And the beauty of these factories is They are digitally defined, right? You've got hardware that can go from making auto parts to defense parts back to back with no downtime in between. So you can be driving a capacity-based model and you can make almost any part, any assembly, one factory, any product. That's our

• 2:54:09Lukas Czinger?

  marketing tagline because that quite literally is what this system unlocks. And we're not ready to say exactly what states we're going to. We've got conversations with multiple, but it's really about the government customer and the prime customer. And of course, yes, the economics and the incentive that we can get.

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I imagine, I imagine people are competing to win, win you over in terms of off, you know, trying to create the best environment for, for a diversion. Is that, is that correct?

• 2:54:39Lukas Czinger?

  Oh, yeah. Yes, absolutely. And the states get competitive. You also see the congressional side of this. You see the various stakeholders get involved and you want to be first as well. You want to show that your state or your exact county is on the forefront of this and they're bringing digital manufacturing. They're bringing the next generation of that to their location. So yes, we're, we're seeing thankfully a lot of demand, a lot of interest and, and a lot of support for these facilities.

• 2:55:09Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  Talk about the actual integration with the customer. You said you want to be, you want to deliver value to them. What are the considerations of actually being near a customer? Is that like they're going to have four deployed engineers in your organization? You're going to have four deployed engineers in their organization? Is it actually beneficial to be like walk across the street? Or is it drive across the town? Or is it like, I need to be near a big airport that's a hub that everyone can fly in and out of? I'm not, I'm not trying to do 20 questions to figure out where you're going. I'm actually just interested in like the business of how you decide where to build.

• 2:55:43Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, you made my job easy. You gave half the answer there. So I appreciate that. But um, no, it's really partially logistics as well for our customers. So if you think about one of the large ones, they're going to end up doing the integration, say of a missile system. Integration, meaning they're gonna put the avionics in it. They're gonna put the payload in it. They're gonna do whatever their end of line testing procedure is, right? And if we, as the primary structure supplier that's making That full airframe for them can be right adjacent to their general assembly facility. That's a huge win for them, right? And that's almost obvious in how you want to architect your production process for a complex system like that.

• 2:56:28Lukas Czinger?

  So as being adjacent to these primes, right? Like walking distance or very easy for a manufacturing process, potentially even being on the campus of these primes. Makes sense. Is in our minds. And then on the government side, you look at these depot centers and sustainment and maintenance. And can we be right adjacent to these bases? So if you look at Oklahoma, for example, Tinker Air Base, can we be adjacent to that airbase? Partner with their Air Force sustainment organization and supply parts directly to the base from that factory? At the same time that that factory could flex, use some of its capacity to do work for the primes that are, you know, in that locality as well.

• 2:57:12Lukas Czinger?

  And that's also the beauty here is no one is burdened with the full cost. Because this is a platform and you can share the capacity. You're not asking the government to pay for a hundred percent of it, a hundred percent of the time. You can actually scale and flex and have elasticity to the capital and the risk associated with that capital. Tordi?

• 2:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any updates on Singer, the, on the, on the automotive side? Specifically the supercar that you guys built?

• 2:57:41Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, no, it's a, it's been an amazing few weeks for us. We've got more cars on the road now, so we did our 10th delivery. As you know, we started deliveries this year, so there's now multiple, multiple cars on the road in LA. Multiple across the US. We actually have our first couple of cars in the UK as well, so we made our way onto uh, greater European turf with America's hypercar. So I'm very excited to keep building that business out, deliver more cars this year, and then look into actually developing variants of that hypercar. Uh, won't announce those now, and then also our next vehicle, our next model altogether. And that feedback loop, that integration with Divergent.

• 2:58:23Lukas Czinger?

  Remains very, very attractive. And frankly, when the government or a customer comes and they come to this campus and they see the Divergent facility, then they walk right next door and they see the general assembly of the 21C, the hypercar, that shows them almost the relationship between us as a subcontractor and the prime, as the prime integrator, right? We're actually putting our own dollars in front of our statements there on how you can integrate for full product development.

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the shape of the workforce going forward? Obviously, new capital comes in, you're probably hiring, you're probably always hiring, but give me some advice for young people that want to get into doing work that might still be around in 30 years?

• 2:59:09Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, yeah. This and that we truly are software and hardware, right? We built our own software, design engine, we've got our own manufacturing software, but we also build hardware. We build our, our 3D printers, we build our assembly cell, we actually engineer those materials. So in terms of scope within one business and amount of vertical depth in each of those pillars is really tremendous here. When you're starting out, we're mostly hiring, or I was mostly looking for talent that could bring a lot to the table day one, both in terms of their connectivity, but also their knowledge and their ability to operate. We're now at a point where we're actually able to hire

• 2:59:50Lukas Czinger?

  on some of the brightest and youngest engineers and production staff, which is an amazing position to be in somewhere where I've wanted to be for, for a few years. And what we look for in that sort of more entry level role is really how scalable is that person going to become? What are they already showing today that I can tell is going to make them a great learner and eventually a great operator? And then we have the individuals here that can add to their expertise that they're bringing in. And within one, two, three years, I want to see that entry level engineer have progressed to a lead engineer or have found his management track and pick one of the two. And that's what we're screening for is, is individuals that are going to scale to that next step.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congratulations on the massive fundraising round. Always good catching up with you. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 3:00:44Lukas Czinger?

  Great to see you both.

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. And we have our next guest in the restream waiting room, Kyle Samani, coming back on the show for the third time, I believe.

• 3:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Talk about creating the world's leading Solana treasury company.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Kyle, can you hear us? How are you doing?

• 3:01:00Kyle Samani?

  What's going on, gentlemen? Good to be here. Hey, Jordi, John.

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  We're back. Great to see you.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Always great to catch up.

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  You've been busy.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  You have been busy.

• 3:01:09Kyle Samani?

  Oh dude, if I've been busy, it's been crazy.

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  Break it down. What's new?

• 3:01:13Kyle Samani?

  Uh, well, I spent two weeks fundraising and then two weeks we raised 1.65 billion.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Is that good? Is that good? Two weeks, 1.65 billion?

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:01:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding. That's, uh, it's hard to do. It's hard to do.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:28Kyle Samani?

  Uh, definitely the most hectic fundraise I've ever done in my life. Um, but it's been super, super fun.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Were you on the, were you on the road or were you holding court just like this? Did you?

• 3:01:39Kyle Samani?

  Oh, Zoom, Zoom in my, in my office.

• 3:01:41Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That's the modern, the modern road show. It's just Zoom link.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, zoom out, give us the, uh, give us the pitch that you gave the investors.

• 3:01:52Kyle Samani?

  Yeah. So, you know, we think, uh, look, there's obviously a lot of digital asset treasury companies out there and we want to be not only the top Solana based digital asset treasury, we want to be the top digital asset treasury in the world. Um, our aspirations is that this, this is a publicly traded permanent capital vehicle and we have aspirations for this thing to become a $50 billion plus publicly traded company over the next, you know, half, five to 10 years. Um, and we think the key to that is going to be the team. Um, the folks I'm working with at Jump and at Galaxy are incredible. Uh, I think we have the absolute all-star dream team, not only of Solana Dats, but of all Dats out there. Um, we bring together that mix of deep trading and technical experience, uh, that, uh, deep experience across capital

• 3:02:37Kyle Samani?

  markets function and being a very large counterparty that trades with almost everyone in crypto and the deep, uh, VC experience in, in Solana Core and Solana ecosystem.

• 3:02:46John Coogan?

  How do people think about digital asset treasury companies these days? There's one world where you're like, this is a hedge fund and I'm backing a trader who's going to pick good entry and exit prices and they're, and it's almost like investing in a hedge fund. Then there's another, which is just because of where my money is locked up for a variety of reasons, maybe it's a 401k. I don't have access to this particular asset class and wrapping a particular digital asset in a public ticker gives you access to that. Which are those reasonable narratives? Are there other narratives that people are talking about? Like what, how do people justify underwriting an investment?

• 3:03:29Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, like I think there's a bunch of reasons you might want to invest in Ford Industries. And by the way, the ticker is Ford, it's F O R D, like the car company, NASDAQ listed. But I think there's a few. The first is like, you have to believe that we as the sponsors of this vehicle can do the interesting things to deliver increasing sold per share for our shareholders. And there's a number of things we can do to that effect. I think probably the most interesting is actually M and A. There's probably going to be 30, maybe 40 of these digital asset treasuries out there, not only Solana related, but all the other assets too.

• 3:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:05Kyle Samani?

  And I don't think the market's going to sustain 30 or 40 of these things. And so there's going to be a ripe opportunity for M and A. And I think given the caliber of our team and the knowledge we have with banking across, especially Galaxy, like we're in a prime position to execute on that. The second, I think really lucrative opportunity is in actually arbitraging capital market structures, meaning we're working on getting loans from banks, you know, hopefully in the 5, 8%, maybe 6% range. And then we can deploy that into Solana DeFi at, you know, today, probably close to 15%.

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:04:39Kyle Samani?

  And arbitrage that spread. That's obviously a very sexy story. Shareholders love hearing stuff like that.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:04:45Kyle Samani?

  The particularly cool thing about that is also we can even use that to fund preferred share issuance. So MicroStrategy or I guess Strategy Now pioneered this concept and they're issuing these preferred perpetuals. And, you know, the problem Strategy has is They are paying a 9% coupon, but they have no cash flow off of their Bitcoin. Um, we can actually produce cash flow both in sole terms and in dollar terms by tapping into the native Solana staking and DeFi ecosystems. So it actually makes the vehicle as a whole, a lot more financially congruent than something like Strategy. Um, so I think those are like the, the best reasons why, and look, in the long term, we're going to be capital allocators across the Solana ecosystem and crypto. Um, and in the long term, it's obviously a bet on our ability to do capital allocation.

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, was there an alternate timeline where the groups that kind of came together into, into Ford went and did their own treasury? Like, did you really have to wrangle people and say like, look, fall in line or let's do this together? Or what, what did that, what did putting the team in the, in the investor group, uh, look like?

• 3:05:48Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, the, the Jump in the Galaxy guys started talking together, but before Multicoin got involved. Um, and they kind of realized they were like, hey, we really need kind of a third leg at the stool. Uh, so they, they called me and, and it was a pretty natural fit. Uh, I didn't, that's been too much time thinking about it. There were some legal questions that we had to work through. Um, in terms of compliance for Multicoin, but we worked through those and we said, all right, guys, let's do this. And they've been absolutely phenomenal partners.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  Uh, take me through some of the other stories that are happening in, uh, the crypto world broadly that might be bullish or bearish, or you know, something to keep an eye on from your perspective. Uh, across stable coins, uh, there's that new Stripe project. There's a few other, uh, like chains that are launching L1s, L2s. Like, what do you think is worth keeping an eye on and, and what's your interpretation of the news?

• 3:06:40Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I think there's a handful. So one is, um, Solana ETFs are coming. I think they're going to be here in the next few weeks.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:06:46Kyle Samani?

  Um, that's obviously like a watershed moment for the rest of the industry. Bitcoin and E have always been kind of like blessed as special assets. And, and, and I think Solana is about to get that same, that same treatment. So that's super exciting.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:58Kyle Samani?

  The second one, this one's really in the weeds, but, um, the team at Pump.Fun has been, they've had a live stream product for about a year now, maybe.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:07:06Kyle Samani?

  And this past weekend, it really blew up.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:08Kyle Samani?

  Um, a handful of creators started making tons and tons of money, uh, this past weekend. And a lot of, uh, creators from Rumble and Twitch are now publicly experimenting on the Pump platform. Um, that could really snowball and gain momentum and, and really kind of change the dynamics around creator monetization. It's actually funny that this happened over the weekend. I was at the All In Summit last week and I gave a presentation there on internet capital markets. I think that video is going to drop in the next couple of days. And one of the examples I actually highlighted in the presentation was the next generation. I talked about entertainment finance and you know, Jim Cramer was entertainment finance 1.0.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:48Kyle Samani?

  And in my presentation, I highlighted Roaring Kitty and Dave Portnoy as being emblematic of entertainment finance 2.0.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:56Kyle Samani?

  And I think we're about to have this just onslaught of streamers who are going to be entertainment finance 3.0.

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:08:02Kyle Samani?

  And it looks like that's a lot of that's going to happen on PUMP and all of PUMP is built on Solana.

• 3:08:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, play that out for me. I mean, that's fascinating since we're in the live stream world. We don't give financial advice, talk about specific stock prices, but I could imagine someone comes out and does something that's much more price driven.

• 3:08:18Jordi Hays?

  We once joked about, somebody was like, how do I invest in TVPN? And we said, well, LVMH, of course, because it's the best proxy. And then somebody immediately while we were live created a Solana token.

• 3:08:30John Coogan?

  We had to kind of disavow it. But I am interested, like, do you think that there's a near term world where stocks go on chain, they get wrapped, and then that live stream PUMP ecosystem, you have like a true Jim Cramer type who's like talking about public companies, but has some sort of like wrapped exposure to the to the coin that's underlyingly tied to the public company or something like that? Is that something that could happen?

• 3:08:55Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, so it's already a fairly common behavior. You'll see a lot of the crypto traders, they'll just pull up their Binance screen or whatever they're trading on. They'll just live stream and you know, trade and talk with their fans and stuff. There's never been a great way to follow along.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:09Kyle Samani?

  Like with buy and sell button, like built into the stream kind of a thing. I do think that, I mean, that now exists with PUMP for the native token of that that stream. So that's already a thing. I think you're going to see more of that kind of streaming products continue to evolve in the pretty near future. As it pertains to tokenized equities, yes, the team at Galaxy actually announced a deal with Superstate to tokenize Galaxy's equity on Solana. It went live a week or two ago. And this is obviously something relevant for Forward Industries, for us with our forward ticker. And we're working on that. I hope to talk about it very soon. And once it's up, we have this tokenized equity, then you'll be able to kind of do that same configuration that you just described.

• 3:09:56Jordi Hays?

  So what, I'm not sure this is correct. So Ford is already trading. Is that, is that?

• 3:10:04Kyle Samani?

  That's correct.

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  That's correct. And, but, but what is the, is it, is it, what, like, why, why is it trading? You, you guys, the saying, is this correct? It's saying the current market cap is somewhere, it's 67 million. Is that, is that correct?

• 3:10:24Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, so, yeah, so we closed on the pipe transaction last week.

• 3:10:29Jordi Hays?

  But it hasn't.

• 3:10:30Kyle Samani?

  It's 1.65 billion.

• 3:10:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:10:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:33Kyle Samani?

  Um, the, the, uh, the SEC, uh, has a, so the company has issued these shares to all of the investors who came into the pipe, including MultiCoin, Jump Galaxy, and many others.

• 3:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:42Kyle Samani?

  And, uh, the SEC has a process by which you have to register new shares that are created, and that process takes roughly 30 days. So the Yahoo Finances of the world and the other kind of major stock screeners only show registered shares.

• 3:10:55John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:10:56Kyle Samani?

  Uh, they're not updated.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Makes sense. Awesome.

• 3:11:00John Coogan?

  What a fascinating world.

• 3:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, uh, you are, you're our resident Solana expert, so.

• 3:11:05John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 3:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Anytime. Congratulations on putting this together. Uh, it's gotta be up there in, in maybe, I don't know, you know, top, top 1,000 roadshows ever, the one, however much you raised in a couple of weeks.

• 3:11:18John Coogan?

  Billion in two weeks, not bad.

• 3:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Definitely top, maybe, probably top five pure Zoom roadshows. Uh.

• 3:11:24John Coogan?

  It's pretty great.

• 3:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great stuff, Kyle. Good to catch up.

• 3:11:27Kyle Samani?

  Appreciate that. Hey, guys, last thing, um, we are hiring at, uh, Ford Industries. Um, you know, we're obviously building out this permanent capital Solana strategy. Uh, if you're watching the show and you're looking for a full new role and opportunity, want to work with us, uh, please get in touch. We're looking to hire awesome people.

• 3:11:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, good luck. We'll talk to you soon, Kyle.

• 3:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Kyle.

• 3:11:44John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 3:11:45Kyle Samani?

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:11:46John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:11:48Jordi Hays?

  The team they put together is pretty, pretty wild.

• 3:11:52John Coogan?

  I haven't had a chance to dig into it. We'll have to.

• 3:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Some heavy hitters.

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  In other news, Kimball Musk, he came on the show a few weeks ago. Uh, he posted that he's deeply honored to have been trusted with Vatican as a stage to bring grace to the world with his dear friend.

• 3:12:09Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  Pharrell Williams and Draymond Bocelli and Jennifer Hudson.

• 3:12:14Jordi Hays?

  I saw some of the.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  We made a miracle.

• 3:12:15Jordi Hays?

  I saw.

• 3:12:15John Coogan?

  You probably saw some of these photos. It's a drone show that happened over the Vatican. Uh, he says, cause grace for the world and, uh, some of the images and videos are, I mean, they look like AI. They look like CGI, but they are actually.

• 3:12:32Jordi Hays?

  I didn't realize he was behind this.

• 3:12:34John Coogan?

  Yes. No, this is, uh, this is his project. We.

• 3:12:36Jordi Hays?

  What I was saying, imagine being the, the tribe in the Amazon and Kimball Musk starts, flies over.

• 3:12:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:43Jordi Hays?

  That is a euphoric.

• 3:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, pretty wild.

• 3:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Spirit.

• 3:12:48John Coogan?

  Uh, and, and, uh, what, what a, what a fantastic, uh, like launch strategy to go to the Vatican, like the biggest possible. Like it's such a striking, everyone has seen this building because when the Pope is elected and the Pope comes out and Pope's chosen. Gives a speech and whenever there is news in the world of the Catholic Church, the TV cameras descend upon the Vatican, of course. Uh, and to put your product right there, uh, is, uh, remarkable. And so I'm sure the full video is out there. We'll have to, we'll have to watch the full thing and, and see, and I'd love to have, uh, Kimball and the team on later. Um, I think that, uh, there's probably more news. The company's growing and.

• 3:13:30Jordi Hays?

  We should.

• 3:13:30John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 3:13:31Jordi Hays?

  We should cap off on this post from Barely AI, which is, which is.

• 3:13:35John Coogan?

  Stay safe out there, folks.

• 3:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, but, uh, this is Trunk, Trunk Fan.

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Trunk, uh, this company, this is an AI startup called Inception Point AI is flooding podcast apps.

• 3:13:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:13:47Jordi Hays?

  They've launched 5,000 podcasts.

• 3:13:49John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Make, make 3,000 episodes a week. They spend $1 to create an episode and monetize by getting programmatic ads. Break even on most episodes if only 20 people listen. Types of podcasts go from lowest effort like weather reports, simple biographies to higher effort. It created 50 AI personalities, including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistle Down.

• 3:14:16John Coogan?

  Thistle Down.

• 3:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Thistle Down and Ollie Bennett, who covers offbeat sports. The company has built 184 custom AI agents. Let's give it up for AI agents. Using various LLMs to create the podcast and occasionally spot checks the output. The CEO, a former exec at podcast studio Wondery, says she wants to make thousands more AI personalities, including an AI Oprah. Now, wouldn't you like to create an AI Oprah? Interesting.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  He closes by saying, so basically an article content farm for podcasts. Well, Trung, it's not an article content farm. It's a radically new AI podcast strategy. It's slop.

• 3:14:57Jordi Hays?

  Put it in.

• 3:14:58John Coogan?

  Brought to your podcast. This is actually extremely annoying. I've searched for biographies on the Apple Podcast app every once in a while to try and get up to speed on things. And the amount of just AI generated content is overwhelming. And then I'm like, well, I could just go to chat G P for that. If I wanted that, that's what I would get. I want something.

• 3:15:19Jordi Hays?

  There was a beautiful time where when you wanted to.

• 3:15:22John Coogan?

  Do some research on someone.

• 3:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Learn about a topic and have and know that somebody like painstakingly spent hours trying to handcraft a story.

• 3:15:32John Coogan?

  I think that the long, I think that the long, the like, the long term outcome here is like institutions get stronger. And so now I've noticed that if I'm searching for the history of an entrepreneur, I just won't search for the name. I search founders podcast and then the name because I just know that like, if it's not that, it's not, it's not worth listening to.

• 3:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder where the article content farms, like how they've done. Obviously they're getting like, you know, if I'm sure some, some have done quite well, but are actually getting hurt by language models now that are just collecting the information and not actually hitting the site as a human. But yeah, I think the funny thing, the funny thing here is like.

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  They stand one of these up, so.

• 3:16:11Jordi Hays?

  They don't have, they don't have like a, any sort of like real technical advantage.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:15Jordi Hays?

  And so on a long enough time horizon, like consumers might, that they might today go, I want to go. And get, I'm gonna go to Spotify to get the weather report from this inception point AI company, or there's a world in the future where they're just, they tell Gemini, make me a podcast every morning about the weather today, tomorrow, and the next day, and just like have it ready for me in the morning. And that just kind of runs.

• 3:16:45John Coogan?

  Well, that's kind of Notebook LM.

• 3:16:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  That's what I'm saying. Is that.

• 3:16:50Jordi Hays?

  It's like every, every consumer AI app will be able to make a podcast.

• 3:16:55John Coogan?

  What is crazy is that the CEO gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, which is basically just like a massive target, compete with me. Like, how many startups do you think launched after this article went out? Like, oh, it's, it's easy to just.

• 3:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you're turning one doll, you're profitable after 20 listens? Great.

• 3:17:14John Coogan?

  Okay, I'll do the same thing.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like.

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  Great.

• 3:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Classic.

• 3:17:17John Coogan?

  This is gonna be the new hustle. This is like, this is something where like, anyone with a.

• 3:17:21Jordi Hays?

  People on.

• 3:17:22John Coogan?

  An open source.

• 3:17:23Jordi Hays?

  LLM are gonna be like, this is the new, this is the new WAP.

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  For sure. This new dropshipping, new.

• 3:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Which will of course.

• 3:17:28John Coogan?

  Get competed away.

• 3:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Destroy the opportunity.

• 3:17:31John Coogan?

  It will. But good luck in the short term. And maybe this grows into something better.

• 3:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the funny thing is, is if out of this, they get one true hit, like if they were to make an AI personality that is, that goes on an Oprah-like run.

• 3:17:46John Coogan?

  It'd be fantastic.

• 3:17:47Jordi Hays?

  It would pay for all this lot.

• 3:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would imagine that it's gotta be crazy, fine tuned, like what we're seeing with Friend, like what we're seeing with that other, that other LLM where you're like, oh, this is, this is an AI, but it's not just the default. So you can't get this level of reporting or this level of content out of Notebook LM because it's so, Notebook LM has a very Notebook LM flavor to it.

• 3:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:09John Coogan?

  Which is good. It's default. It's, it's information. Tyler, you have a take? What you got?

• 3:18:14Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely right, John.

• 3:18:16John Coogan?

  Thank you, Tyler. The chat was asking for more Tyler cutaways and we're working on it. Also, I loved when Lucas Singer came on the show. The chat was just, series Z, series Z. He did the meme. He did the meme. Thank you, chat. You guys have been fantastic today. Great to see you all. Great to see Raghav and Bobby and Dak and John Exley, of course, Ilhan. So many good folks, so many names we know and love in the chat.

• 3:18:43Jordi Hays?

  And on that note. Have a wonderful afternoon.

• 3:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:47Jordi Hays?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for being with us today. Go subscribe to our newsletter, Brandon.

• 3:18:55John Coogan?

  tbpn.substack.com.

• 3:18:56Jordi Hays?

  We're very hard on it, or you can just go to tbpn.com.

• 3:18:59John Coogan?

  You can.

• 3:18:59Jordi Hays?

  You can subscribe there, wherever you want. We'll be in your inbox and leave us five stars on Spotify. Apple Podcasts goes a long way. Remember, we still have our arrangement where if you leave a review on Apple and you put an advertisement for your company in the review, we will read it out on stream.

• 3:19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, free ads.

• 3:19:20Jordi Hays?

  And advertise your business. So, um, thank you to everyone for tuning in and we'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:19:25John Coogan?

  See you all. Goodbye.